Like most Halloweens, I wore my costume to work today over my work clothing and it got a great response! It was super fun and it didn't even look weird that I had regular clothes on underneath it. I left work a little early though to try to get home before the trick-or-treaters started. When I got home, there were already about 6 cars parked outside my neighborhood and there were a few people wandering around.
Here's what the street looked like at about 5:15 pm
I quickly set everything up - a few chairs for us to sit on, the candy bowl, and a few ghouls for decoration. They put up a sign out front of the neighborhood that says "Trick-or-Treaters welcome from 6:30pm to 8:30 pm. Obviously people weren't waiting until 6:30pm. It started to get busy around 6:00pm.
See the brown pirate hat in the bottom? That's me!
Once it starts to get this busy, it's pointless to ring the doorbell because you would never get to close the door. So everyone just sits out on the driveway and hands it out as quick as they can.
They seem to come in swarms...
Continues to get busier and busier!
Here you can see Me, Mary, and Dop handing out candy with our skeleton butler and red faced greeter behind us
By the time it gets dark, the line basically becomes non-stop. Sorry if these are hard to see...my camera isn't the greatest.
They go all over and through our yards sometimes
At least no one broke or stole any of our decorations this year!
This year, to get people to go home the police drove through like a parade. They had been driving through the neighborhood periodically throughout the night but at 8:45 ish they drove through and were using the megaphones saying "Trick Or Treating is now over...move along". It was very official, haha! It was nice to know they were watching for mischief and helping keep our neighborhood safe from people up to no good.
Whoop whoop...time to go home! There must have been at least 20 cruisers plus a few vans and K9 units
Finally, this year I downloaded a "counter" app. You just click the volume button and it tallys as you click. So we had two people handing out candy, one person refilling their drinks and candy bowls and the fourth person using the counter. Here is the grand total of trick or treaters for 2012:
Two thousand, one hundred and thirty nine Trick Or Treaters!! Um...I'm pretty sure that all those kids don't live in our neighborhood
There might have been a few people who came through more than once but as the candy giver, you are mostly focused on finding the opening in their bag and getting the candy in there. Most of the people were pretty polite but there are always a few that say things like "only one piece? How cheap" or "they used to give out better candy in this neighborhood", etc. Mostly it's the teenagers and the adults who can be rude.
Between the crazy party and the mob of trick or treaters, I'd say we had another excellent Halloween! I hope everyone else had a great and safe Halloween!
Between the crazy party and the mob of trick or treaters, I'd say we had another excellent Halloween! I hope everyone else had a great and safe Halloween!
