Halloween '05

By 9am, I was lying groaning on the couch in front of Harry Potter. Mike laughed when he saw me wiping a smear from Gavin's chin, and came over to with a cloth to clean the chocolate off my own face. We had discovered caramel wraps - a great invention that eliminates the mess of melting caramel. We draped the apples in blankets of caramel, popped them in the oven, and rolled them in mini chocolate chips. Happiness on a stick.

As the evening approached, I pounded out a book critique for class while drinking a pumpkin ale. My mother put on her costume, which she has been carefully bent over with needle and thread for several days, and went off to class with our papers and a stuffed goose (she was Mother Goose). I remained at my post as candy server.

While dressing up as a pirate, I had to stop after my second layer of eyeliner to get the boys ready. Mike spent a good twenty minutes destroying his work pants with a pair of scissors before rolling in mud for authenticity. Gavin sat very still as I carefully rubbed kohl around his eyes. He laughed when I held him to the mirror, then posed with his plastic rapier.

Mike made a toddler run and came back with my little cousin Chris. As the sun set, the boys charged around the lawn in their blinking sneakers, pausing to look into the jack-o-lantern, and finally grabbing their pumpkin buckets and hitting the dark streets with Mike. I popped in a Halloween music mix and stood vigil with the candy.

I handed out candy to a lot of princesses and ninjas. The older boys have taken to snapping on plastic masks and wearing their backpacks backwards to serve as candy bags. Pathetic. I gave them pixie sticks for their weak efforts.

The boys came back an hour later and dumped their buckets on the rug, ripping through as many candies as possible, tasting and discarding them in favor of the next brightly colored wrapper. When we began to run low on candy to distribute, Gavin picked out his hard candies and bubblegums to contribute to the pot, cheerfully greeting trick-or-treaters with "Happy Halloween!" and handing out the candy himself. He is such a good kid, he makes me so damn proud.
 

Mike returned Chris to his mom and we dumped Gavin in the tub. When my mother came home, Gavin told her all about his ghostly adventures, then curled up on her lap and sleepily watched The Nightmare Before Christmas.

All told, a successful holiday.