Well, I survived Halloween. Survived is an appropriate word when you have several kids that cannot wait until the sun goes down.
The littlest ones keep wanting to know how many minutes until it gets dark, while the older ones keep trying to tell you that they are old enough to go with their friends or by themselves.
Then there is the actual preparation involving makeup and costumes. For once, there was no one that was crying because they didn't the costume. Once in a while, miracles do happen.
I am not the one who takes the kids on the rounds of the houses. With arthritic knees, I'd never last. Instead, I stay home and pass out candy to the trick-or-treaters.
This is a nice neighborhood. The houses are relatively new and it is in an area without local casinos, so the crime rate here is much lower than in certain other areas of the city.
The result of this is that on Halloween, concerned parents from the less safe neighborhoods drive their children to the safer neighborhoods to go trick-or-treating. This year we had about 300 trick-or-treaters.
Many of residents ran out of candy. Some just turned off their porch lights. Some just told the children, "Sorry, we're out of candy." Some gave out coins when they ran out of candy.
Because of the latter, one child told me that if I was low on candy, he would take money instead. He was quite put out when I dropped candy in his pillowcase and told him no, he wasn't getting any money. "Oh, maaaaaaaan."
Fortunately, he was the one with that attitude.
While on irc today, my friends told me that they had few children find their way to their doors last night. They wondered if Halloween was a dying holiday.
Around here, it's alive and well. But, then again, Halloween is falls on the same date that Nevada celebrates it's statehood. The schools are closed and the kids have more time to prepare for the evenings festivities.
for the border background.