Halloween!

Jonas as Jay from Lego Ninjago

 Liam the zombie ghost

Adele the bee

Living in a small-ish town they do Halloween a little differently. Because Halloween fell on a Wednesday the county decided to schedule trick-or-treating on Tuesday from 6 to 8 since Wednesdays are when most churches around here do their youth night (ours included). As Tuesday got closer it was pretty obvious that there was going to be bad weather, possibly even a blizzard, so they rescheduled trick-or-treating for Thursday from 6 to 8. I was pretty excited that we actually got to go trick-or-treating because I spent a lot of time putting these costumes together and was going to be pretty upset if they never got to wear them! Their elementary school is just a street away from the downtown area and a little tradition is for the kids to go trick-or-treating to the businesses on Halloween. The weather was cold and wet that day so the businesses came to the school and set up in the gym so they could still go. These kids are spoiled!

Another thing they do differently is where you go trick-or-treating. The way the town is laid out is not very convenient for hitting a lot of houses at once. You might have a cluster of 10 here and another 10 a mile away. So instead of driving from house cluster to house cluster almost everyone goes to the only "normal" subdivision in the area. The poor residents of this subdivision end up passing out candy to like 600 people! They seem to be good sports about it though and most of them bring chairs out into their driveways so the kids don't have to walk all the way up to the door (spoiled!). We went last year and I was completely overwhelmed with the number of people and a little embarrassed that we were going there even though we didn't live there. There is a couple in our Branch that live there and the always host a little get together so we have a meeting place and hangout. I didn't plan on going again this year and thought we'd just find a few houses around their school to go to. It's not like they needed a ton of candy anyways since they already went trick-or-treating at school! But Nate made plans to meet some of our friends so we went. We ended up having a lot of fun. The kids scored tons more candy and even Adele got into it (although she did keep trying to pick her own candy when she went to the houses). By the end of the night she had a sucker in each hand and was a happy girl!