goodWe live in a basement apartment. The entrance is round the side of the house down a flight of stairs that you wouldn't even know was there if you didn't come up to the house. Last year on Halloween i was so thrilled to be living in a residential area in North America so i bought a giant bowl of candy for the inevitable trick-or-treaters. We put jack-o'-lanterns up the top of the stairs, and stuck some flashy battery-powered pumpkin light things and a skull in the flower pot next to the stairs. We waited all evening and not a single kid knocked on the door. We would have had no luck at all if a friend who was having dinner with us hadn't gone out of the door and yelled at some kids on the street to come get candy. We had three kids that night.
This year around September i was all geared up to fix things. I wanted to properly decorate the house, in a way that'd actually encourage kids to brave the ominous staircase down to our front door. But we have no external power sockets, so we can't have lights outside. And our house is all stuccoed so we can't really hammer anything in. And our "front yard" is actually a side yard that sits closer to our upstairs neighbor's entrance than ours. And, well, i got sidetracked with work and this and that. We didn't even get decorations up inside the house till halfway through October, and that was J's doing (which kinda blew me away considering she doesn't even like Halloween). So come Halloween night i was pretty much prepared for nothing to happen. We put jack-o'-lanterns out just in case, but meh. Dude, we almost ran out of fucking candy!
I guess the weather was better this year - the tea lights stayed on inside our pumpkins, which probably helped to see them better. Plus a couple months ago J's dad built a reflective house number that we slotted into the column of bricks our landlord stacked by the top of the stairs earlier in the year. Walking along the street it actually kinda looks like someone lives here now. Whatever magic enticed the kids in this time round, it rocked. I was giddy - i think i was more excited to give out candy than the kids were to get it. It just made me happy to do, even in the middle of dinner. Maybe i'm just not sick of it yet. I never really got to do this when i was a kid so it's special to me now.
And still i don't want to dress up. Heh. How can you celebrate a dress-up holiday without dressing up? I just enjoy what everyone else is wearing. When it comes to clothes i'm a lost cause yanno.
