The Greatest Holiday – Halloween

I love Halloween for many different reasons and it seems like I get a new one each year. Not only do you get to dress up as someone or something else (lack of self-confidence), carve pumpkins (playing with knives), wander the streets late at night (even if it’s a school night), and get candy from complete strangers (which ever other day of the year is a no-no), now that I’m a dad I can scare the crap out of a 2 year old and no one can stop me (except my wife).

For this years Halloween I’ve done the normal decorating of the house, skeletons hanging on the porch, zombies in the lawn and a scarecrow/zombie sitting on my front porch. But what makes this year even more special is my son is old enough to get scared.

But I don’t want to ruin this most holy of days for him, and I definitely don’t want to pay for the therapy bills in the future, so I try and do fun things with him as well. On the nights it’s not raining, which are few and far between these days, we take a walk around the block in the evenings to see what other people have hung on their houses. He loves spending time in front of each house to tell me not to be scared, “it’s just fake, it’s plastic”. Then we move on to the next house only to reassure me, and himself, not to be scared.

When trapped in the house because of the rain, we watch whatever kid friendly Halloween program that’s on. This past week my son got to experience “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” among other things for his first time. I was actually surprised that he sat through it, being that the show is more than 40 years old and the animation looks even older. But he watched it from beginning to end, twice.

While watching Halloween TV we also have to eat Halloween foods, like caramel apples. We have had so many apples come through our house lately, with trips to Eckert’s and Rombach’s, we’ve had to do something with them. My wife melted some caramel and we got a chance to dip the apples and roll them in all sorts of goodies. The best topping so far has been Reese’s Peanut Butter Chips.

All-in-all this Halloween should be a great one and hopefully the rain will stop long enough for us to walk around the block. But if not, my little dragon will still scare our neighbors while I carry an umbrella and shiver. I guess it’s payback for all the torture I’ve given him.

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