Halloween, The Wrap Up

I live in a subdivision in suburban Birmingham.  I guess it is like most subdivisions with houses and families of all ages, though, as the older people either downsize or croak the houses are snatched up by people with kiddos.  This is the biggest advantage of living in a very good school district.  I also live in one of those incorporated areas that does not have enough available housing for the people who want to live here, so houses are listed with a "Coming Soon" sign and are sold before they are ever officially for sale.  Houses sell so quickly sometimes I never know someone has moved or that new folks have moved in.

The point of this rambling is to talk about my plans for Halloween.  Normally I have between 80-90 trick or treaters.  Though numbers are not my strong suit I do know of about 10 houses that sold recently and it doesn't take a genius to figure out how many additional kids that is basing it on 2 per house. So by my math I figure I need between 100-110 treats. However the weather forecast was for severe rains, which would skew the numbers a bit. In addition to the weather several local churches were having the equivalent of trunk or treat (cause we would not want anyone to actually celebrate Halloween, right?) indoors so no one would have to get wet.

I buy full size Hershey Bars for the kids.  I have for years and I don't mind the price.  It is worth it, especially since all the kids know that I am the Big Candy Bar Lady, but I have little will power and don't want a ton of leftover candy.  So I stood in Costco last night debating between 2 boxes of 36 or 3.  After debating the pros and cons of each I decided to go ahead and buy 3 boxes.  I figured that would give me 108 bars which should cover everyone, after all there are always a few who trick or treated last year who don't do it anymore.   Since the rains were supposed to hit at normal trick or treat time I expected the kids to begin early.  I just didn't expect it at 4:30.  By shortly after 5 I had gone through 65 candy bars and then had another 19 kids filter in and out until about 6:30.  Then the bottom fell out and that pretty much put an end to the whole evening.

Now I am sitting here with 2 dozen candy bars screaming at me.  I think they have to go to the freezer immediately.

As a little holiday aside, I found out for one family around the corner, I am their "consequence" house.  It seems if their kids misbehave during the evening they have to skip the big candy bar house. According to their mom this is the first year all three kids got to come to my door.  It makes me a little sad to think my Hershey Bar treat is punishment. Let them trick or treat and then confiscate it for a few days, but let them come!

And now Halloween is over, tomorrow all the Halloween stuff goes back in storage for a year and I will actually begin Christmas decorations.  I won't install any yet, but I will begin putting things together beginning tomorrow.  It is an illness!