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Oct. 31st, 2009 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaI'm pretty pleased with how this year's pumpkins turned out. I mean, I'm not a squash artist or anything. But I do this with a steak knife - I don't have any special carving tools.
This year Alex consulted heavily on the design. We kept drawing sketches for each other on the edge of the newspaper, until we could come to agreement about each element. The eyelashes were her idea.
Every year the neighborhood Halloween presence just gets... more. This year a neighborhood church hosted a Halloween party for the kids, complete with games, pizza, treats, and a haunted house. At a given time, everyone was sent out for the "trick or treat parade," which routed us along a small circuit with marked stops. Last year, the wine store was expecting trick-or-treaters and the proprietor of the Afghan restaurant was so taken with Alex's robot costume that he went and got a little bowl of candy from his bar. This year, quite a few neighborhood restaurants, stores, and even a couple of bars listed themselves as a trick-or-treat destination.
The circuit also led us along two blocks of private homes. On those two blocks (one was ours) many people were just sitting out on their stoops with a bowl of candy, even if their house wasn't officially marked on the map. Our next door neighbors were on their stoop drinking champagne out of water glasses and eating tapas; after the kids were done we hung out with them and visited for a while, and I saw more of the same going on up and down the block.
I like the way Halloween feels in our neighborhood. It's a holiday that has been opened up graciously to welcome the kids, but it's not all about the kids. Groups of costumed adults heading off to parties at the local bars intersect with groups of families trick-or-treating, and everyone admires each other. There's a strong neighborhood, community feel that was absent from my childhood Halloweens, when you didn't really talk to other groups of trick-or-treaters and the goal was to see how many streets you could cover - we carried pillowcases for our treats.
Michael handed out candy to about fifty kids. I noticed that the crowd was more diverse this year. Initially, the neighborhood trick-or-treating was organized by some of the middle- to upper-income white homeowners, and they handed out invitations to all the neighborhood kids that they knew. I think that tended to leave out lower-income familes, renters, and a lot of the African-Americans. Each year it's gotten a little more open. This year, maybe because of the big public church party, the big parade of trick-or-treaters was much less homogeneous, although I think it was all still neighborhood kids. Cool.
This year Alex consulted heavily on the design. We kept drawing sketches for each other on the edge of the newspaper, until we could come to agreement about each element. The eyelashes were her idea.
Every year the neighborhood Halloween presence just gets... more. This year a neighborhood church hosted a Halloween party for the kids, complete with games, pizza, treats, and a haunted house. At a given time, everyone was sent out for the "trick or treat parade," which routed us along a small circuit with marked stops. Last year, the wine store was expecting trick-or-treaters and the proprietor of the Afghan restaurant was so taken with Alex's robot costume that he went and got a little bowl of candy from his bar. This year, quite a few neighborhood restaurants, stores, and even a couple of bars listed themselves as a trick-or-treat destination.
The circuit also led us along two blocks of private homes. On those two blocks (one was ours) many people were just sitting out on their stoops with a bowl of candy, even if their house wasn't officially marked on the map. Our next door neighbors were on their stoop drinking champagne out of water glasses and eating tapas; after the kids were done we hung out with them and visited for a while, and I saw more of the same going on up and down the block.
I like the way Halloween feels in our neighborhood. It's a holiday that has been opened up graciously to welcome the kids, but it's not all about the kids. Groups of costumed adults heading off to parties at the local bars intersect with groups of families trick-or-treating, and everyone admires each other. There's a strong neighborhood, community feel that was absent from my childhood Halloweens, when you didn't really talk to other groups of trick-or-treaters and the goal was to see how many streets you could cover - we carried pillowcases for our treats.
Michael handed out candy to about fifty kids. I noticed that the crowd was more diverse this year. Initially, the neighborhood trick-or-treating was organized by some of the middle- to upper-income white homeowners, and they handed out invitations to all the neighborhood kids that they knew. I think that tended to leave out lower-income familes, renters, and a lot of the African-Americans. Each year it's gotten a little more open. This year, maybe because of the big public church party, the big parade of trick-or-treaters was much less homogeneous, although I think it was all still neighborhood kids. Cool.
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Date: 2009-11-01 02:13 am (UTC)We got some light rain out here, which I thought might dampen the stream of trick-or-treaters, but they seemed impervious to it.
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Date: 2009-11-01 04:35 pm (UTC)