We kinda dig Halloween in our house. Not because we're Worshipers of the Devil's Holiday like our neighbors believe or anything so serious. We just like creative costumes (that's me dressed as The Beltway at Cootie's Shower) and funny decorations and startling people.

I've tried very hard not to forcibly pass on my interests and/or prejudices to the Dormouse. For example, ever since I was seven years old and we moved into a house built in the 1960s and my bedroom had pink paint on the walls and pink trim around the windows and pink shelves and BRIGHT PINK SHAG CARPETING and my mother purchased, what else, pink sheets and a pink bedspread, I have despised the color pink. Someone once told me, "You're going to be cursed with a kid who loves Disney Princesses and pink clothes just because you hate them so much," and it's come true. And despite my irrational prejudice against the color pink and Happily Ever Afters, I've tried very hard not to let that interfere with Dormouse's very real and personal tastes and likes and dislikes. I'll try and purchase clothes and things that aren't pink because I prefer something else, but there are times when I give her a choice and she says, "I want the pink one - with Cinderella on it," and I have to back off... because, Crazy Lady, it's a COLOR and it's HER CHOICE.

I imagine I'll be fighting that internal battle much over the next few years. And I'll be fighting it externally when KingofHearts insists she become proficient with a katana by the time she's six.

But in the area of Halloween, Fall, and All Things Pumpkin, I do not have to worry because with very little encouragement from me, this child loves Halloween. Since before she could really talk, she was fascinated by pumpkins (one of her first words) and skeletons (which she called Mr. Funny Teeth) and loved dressing up and looking at every single Halloween display in every grocery, drug, and convenience store across the metro area.

And that makes me happy, because, man, was last night fun. We made sweet and spicy pumpkin seeds - as far as I'm concerned, the only way to consume them. We decorated the house. We trick-or-treated at all the houses in the neighborhood with decorations - because a three-year-old doesn't need that much candy and what she really loves is seeing all the decorations and exclaiming, "Oh. My! Look. At. That. House! What. In. My. Life!" We spent a good deal of time sitting on the stoop listening to Dormouse pontificate, "What a nice night for trick-or-treating" and watching her hastily grab a handful of candy and run out to the driveway to make sure the parents of kids who had come to the door also got their treats. We looked at the moon. We remarked how our black cat was the perfect Halloween accessory. We laughed our butts off when KingofHearts and his friend scared teenagers with a four foot fake spider that they'd rigged up to drop out of the tree when someone walked by. And we carved pumpkins... lots of pumpkins.

King of Hearts' two were scary:
Mine were sad attempts at creativity and covering up the places where my pumpkins had started to rot because we didn't realize that the pumpkin patch had some less-than-fresh pumpkins lying around. I used a power drill and a hole saw... and scored huge points on KingofHearts' Weird Sexual Fetishes Scale after doing that:
Dormouse chose whimsical and happy (the one on the left):
And our friend, visiting from out of town, went with the tribute pumpkin:


Do you see the likeness?


Happy Halloween Everyone!