Spooky Halloween Night

Boo, boo, boo, boo!
I'm a ghost to scare you!
From Halloween town I've come this night,
All dressed from tip to toe in White.
BOOoo-oo, BOOoo-oo, BOO!

(My kids will remember the tune.)

at Sister Haney's

We have a definite lack of Halloween pictures with costumes over the years.  We have actually almost none, casualty of a lack of a camera.  This one was taken by Geraldine Haney, a grandmother and great-grandmother who lived a block away from our first rental home in Tacoma.  She had a Polaroid camera and always took a shot when we showed up at her door.  She was my first visiting teacher, and she personally made a baby quilt for every baby born in the ward for decades.  Roseanne still has hers, it survived.  We also went and sang for her at Christmas every year.  Her home no longer exists, it was bought out and leveled for a parking garage because it sat right across the street from the County-City building--which is the courthouse, jail, and various offices. 

Christina here is in her snow suit plus big homemade rabbit ears, and Emily is in some kind of a magician's robe made out of a sheet, over her coat.  It was bitter cold that year.  The Polaroid doesn't come out perfectly in the scanner, but you can tell they are having a good time.  They weren't old enough to know that they shouldn't be satisfied with homemade outfits, but old enough to know that they got treats Mom didn't allow most of the time, and they got to join in this big kid process.

Some years on our block we have had no more trick or treaters than you could count on your fingers.  Some years things pick up.  This year things have been busy but seem to be done now.  My delightful crazy friend Yvonne brought 'treats' she said for everyone who came to water aerobics today, stapled into paper bags, and when I opened mine at home it was some kind of jelly-ish plastic bug or crab, about three inches long, which I hung up on the wreath nail on the door when I turned on the porch light to signal that the candy distributors were 'in.'  It had a belly full of little round balls, as white and transparent as the body.  To our amazement, once put out onto the door, it became a mini-strobe!  Apparently it absorbed and then activated in the light--dark--cold--I have no actual idea, and it's a beacon to the kids.  Maybe I smooshed it and activated some inside bit handling it as I pushed the paper clip through the top hole.

That's a large paper clip it's hanging from on a nail, and it looks pink because the still camera can't capture the light show, but out of the bag, in my hand, it was clear white. The strobe effect is red, blue, and yellow. I have no idea where this came from, but it's a tiny piece of hilarious, and it's going crazy out there on our door.