We had a pretty mellow Halloween this year that started off with some pumpkin carving. I usually like to do it a few days ahead of time, but since the boy had hockey every night this week, it just didn’t happen. Instead Saturday afternoon was devoted to decorating & the scooping of pumpkin guts while we listened to H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds audiobook.

We stayed home to give out candy this year – the first time we’ve lived in a house that gets trick-or-treaters! We’ve always been in condos or houses divided into multiple suites, which we still are, actually, just now we live in the main part of the house. We got a ton of kids too. The pug in his bumblebee costume was a big hit.

As a social experiment, it was interesting to see how much candy kids would take if you let them pick what they wanted versus if I doled it out. With the exception of 2 kids who grabbed tiny handfuls, the children were incredibly polite, carefully selecting one single piece each. That’s it. Lots of “Thank you!”s & “Happy Halloween!”s were shouted. No pumpkins smashed or eggs thrown. Just incredibly well-behaved kids in super cute costumes, my favorite being the 4 year old girl dressed in a pretty authentic looking Mountie uniform.

The mister carved a Space Invaders pumpkin & accidentally carved right through the eye blocks. Fortunately they were reattached with toothpicks & it looked pretty rad:

Part 2 of our social experiment began when I started putting my Awesome Possum bookmarks into the candy bowl. I may have skewed the tally a bit when I answered the door, since I couldn’t resist saying, “We’ve got AWESOME bookmarks too!” Still, quite a few kids took them & I ran out of them completely by the end of the night.

I was always one of those kids who really liked the few houses that gave out something different – toothbrushes, stickers, crayons, home baked goodies. I didn’t *only* want those things, of course, and I definitely wanted my big bag of sugar, but it was a nice change. Of my friends who were over on Halloween, however, I was the oddball. Apparently the normal reaction to being given those items as a trick-or-treater (as far as my friends & loved ones can be considered an average sample group), is to throw them in the bushes.

My mister is out raking leaves right now & he’s on the lookout for stray bookmarks.