Halloween fun

Our English Halloween celebration ended up being pretty fun, and not entirely different from what we're used to, anyway.

For starters, I didn't have to decorate my house at all - we have enough spiders and webs to scare anyone!

This afternoon Susanna had a friend over to play, and then I took all 3 kids to a Halloween party at Ben's school.  The party was great!  The room was well decorated with various crepe paper, balloons, etc.  They had games to play, dancing, and plenty of sweets.  They had a bowl of jelly (Jell-o) for the kids to stick their hands in to find little plastic critters - the girls loved this!  They also had dinner, which I loved.

After the party, we went to another friend's house for a quick trick-or-treat.  We weren't sure if it would be worthwhile to trick-or-treat around our neighborhood.  I've heard that some people do it, but not everyone, and I figured it might not be very fun if we went out and didn't find anyone giving out candy.  (And I feared that we might ring someone's doorbell and they would have no idea what we were up to!)  

So my friend called with the idea to meet on her cul-de-sac and trick-or-treat at the houses there, plus the cars of whoever else came.  It worked out great - its a quiet street so the kids could run around with no worries about traffic.  And the kids got enough candy to make it fun, but not an entire pumpkin-full, or anywhere close.

And I was just grateful that we had something to dress up for on Halloween!

Here are two differences I noticed today:

• Candy corn was referred to as "skittles".  Actually, I only heard this because we had some candy corn stickers...  I'm not sure I even saw any candy corn in the stores.

• Most kids here dress up as something Halloween-related - pumpkins, cats, vampires, witches, etc...  Ben dressed in his Philadelphia Eagles uniform and was one of the few non-Halloweeny kids the party.  There were no princesses at all!  I suppose that isn't even considered an option.
  

So, we had lots of fun and the kids were, of course, exhausted.  Though I do have to say that we sort of missed trick-or-treating with our old neighbors in Brownstown...  We hope everyone had (or has) fun tonight!