embracing chaos: light up the night

I have never been much of a Halloween person until now and it wasn't because Lance is old enough to dress up and go trick-or-treating. Lance did dress up, but we were having too much fun at our house so we didn't go trick-or-treating. Our small group "lighted up the night" and it was a lot of fun. A lot of churches have harvest festivals, don't celebrate Halloween, or want people to come to them, but we wanted to go to people and light up the night. Wednesday morning the guys set up lights in the front yard and raked a leaf pile. We had three games for trick-or-treaters and hot chocolate and cider for the adults. The kids were able to get a whole lot of candy at our house. We gave them 30 second to find as much candy as they could in the leaf pile (sometimes it was tough to find a single piece because it was quite a big pile and it all sunk to the bottom), they could throw glow-in-the-dark necklaces around pumpkins of different point values and how many points determined how many pieces of candy they could win, and finally they tried to get a glow stick in a bottle to win candy. The families from the neighborhood really enjoyed the games and families passing through the neighborhood would stop in the middle of the street to come over and play. Having games was a lot more fun than just handing out candy. We didn't know if we would get many kids coming by because we did not hand out candy the last two years and our neighbors had gotten pretty burned out and no longer handed out candy, but we go a good turn out. We had stopped handing out candy in the past because we got frustrated by the rude kids with lack of costumes the first year we lived here. This year the lack of thank yous, the large number of kids that aren't from our neighborhood, and the lack of costumes didn't bother me at all, I guess it is from the change in attitude, I had more of a serving attitude and wanted to give kids candy regardless of what they did and hoped that they had a good time. Before yesterday I wasn't sure how we were going to celebrate Halloween, but now I hope we will be able to go all out again and light up the night.

I did make sure that Lance got plenty of use of his Halloween costume, we wore it all day! He loved the costume and would dance around in it, it was very cute. I was worried that he wouldn't keep it on, but he did great. He was afraid of people in masks, we went by the Cooks, and he was very leery of John in his sheet and Thomas when he had his mask on. I got some funny pictures of the three of them and in both shots Lance looks terrified. So Halloween was a lot of fun and I can't wait for next year.