Tonight it was the ‘harvest festival’ at the fundie church down the block, another traffic jam as all of the parents and kids who were definitely not celebrating Halloween parked wherever they felt like, and Sheriff deputies helping them cross the road.

It used to be that people depended on their imaginations to create fun, but today everyone depends on their wallets. We are losing the ability to create, and can only mimic.

Thanks Bryan for your story. And sadly, like everything else now, you are correct about the commercialization. Like Christmas and Easter, Halloween was a time that brought families together in preparation. Now it’s just a mad rush to the stores to but everything, and it’s all crap. *shrug*

Sorry to hear about Stella Steve! I hope she get’s better quickly, and you will both be well.

Many years ago, I was house-sitting and looking after my oldest friend’s 9 yo daughter. Several days before Halloween, I was telling her and a couple of her friends stories of my experiences as a child. 🙂 She told me they had never celebrated Halloween! I was a little saddened but unsurprised (my friend lived an a wealthy and exclusive suburb that most people in Melb. have never even heard of). The next day when my little friend came home from school, she was not her usual happy self. She told me that some of her friends at school were all excited about Halloween and going ‘trick-or-treating’, and she was sad that she couldn’t. I thought about it, and called her Father 9who was working overseas), and said I wanted to organise an outing for his daughter and friends, but I didn’t know many of the locals, and i didn’t think they would be very interested at all (They were mostly surgeons, Barristers, Judges, and so on). I convinced my friend to convince his neighbors that it was a real treat for the kids and would be fun for all! Over the next few days I received calls from people asking what they could do and what needed to be done! Once the ball started rolling, it became an avalanche! It was all I could do to keep it simple and fun for the kids! (People with money tend to go nuts when they latch onto something!) I had never seen my little friend look so happy and excited! So we organised costumes, decorations, treats, and of course, tricks over the next week. I ended up marching around the suburb with 24 little *monsters*! I organised them into groups of 3 so they all wouldn’t overwhelm every house in the block! 😉 😆 Everyone had such a great time that it became a regular annual event. See… even wealthy stick-in-the-mud’s can be convinced to let their hair down and have fun, for their kid’s anyway. 😉

I got the nest prize of all… lot’s of big hugs from lot’s of happy kids! Especially my little friend and Goddaughter (who is 23 now and would probably cringe at this!) Is there anything better? 😀

I miss that time. Life was good then. 🙂

Once again, I have failed in my years-long intention to collect Halloween decorations in storage and put them up at Christmas. For one thing, the Halloween decorations have grown more expensive, elaborate… and large. On our block, there’s a gigantic inflatable black cat that glowers at you and turns its head side-to-side. But most of the decorations have a hard plastic look about them, a straight-out-of-the-box look that makes me pine for the Halloweens of my childhood. Hey! Pine… box… I’ve got an idea!

Actually we’re not celebrating this year. Stella is home from work, sick with a bad cold, and for some reason is averse to dozens of kiddies trooping to the front door. This neighborhood’s got ’em; in two recent years, we’ve run out of goodies within an hour or so of sunset.