Halloween is coming and going in just a flash. Can't believe how quickly this month has flown by! It may have something to do with being gone for 9 days smack dab in the middle of it, but more on that in another post.
I did my usual quick and simple Halloween decorating this year, keeping in mind that we have seven grandchildren, 2 years and under, so whatever I have within reach needs to be touchable and even playable. Notice all of the things in the picture below, that are at child-level. They can play with the ghosts, car, pumpkin and scarecrow to their heart's delight.
We went up to the cabin and cut some gorgeous maple branches to begin with. I don't care a bit that the leaves curl up and shrivel a little. I am so in love with the color that I don't even notice it. I wonder if people who come to my house try to figure out why I have branches of dead leaves strewn all about. Oh well. Maybe it adds to the spooky effect?
After I placed the leaves around, I just took out
one box (Yay!) of Halloween decor, and placed items here and there around the house.
I don't love the creepy or gory side of this holiday. I don't even really like dressing up. (My costume usually involves an orange jack-o-lantern t-shirt, or some such thing.) But I do love how much the kiddos love it, and I love to see their costumes and how excited they get. I love fall and the smells and colors of it. So.... that's pretty much how my decorating goes. Oh, and some Fisher Price Halloween toys to go along with it all. After all, I'm a grandma, and the littles need to have lots of fun at our house!
The best thing about fall decorating with branches as the base, is that the day after Halloween, I just take out the Halloween-specific items, and throw in a few Thanksgiving ones, and voila! Another holiday decorated for! Fall decorations seriously can last for more than two months. I sure wish Christmas decorations could be up that long, because they take the most work.
How much do you love this old Alfred Hitchcock book? It's the perfect Halloween decoration!
Another good thing about gathering branches and leaves as your base for decorating? You don't have to store them. You just toss them in the garbage when Thanksgiving is over! Doesn't get any easier than that!
And last night we had a trunk-or-treat in the church parking lot. I'm generally not a fan of the old trunk-or-treating in our neighborhood, simply because the kids that show up to trunk-or-treat are the the exact same kids who show up at our house only a few days later for round #2. Does that sound Humbug-ish? Maybe. But I've always thought trunk-or-treating was great for areas that might be iffy to trick-or-treat in, or if your church group was spread out over a large area, but wanted an opportunity to trunk-or-treat together. That makes so much sense. But going to the same car trunks as the houses they will trick-or-treat to a couple of days later seems a little much. Having said that, we whole-heartedly got into the spirit of things, because I certainly know the kiddies love getting twice as much candy, and I also know that if I was one of those kids, I would have loved the heck out of it.
We decided to decorate the tractor and use that as our "trunk", since Bob is known for his tractoring around these parts. I had a little bug the day I was planning on decorating it, so I literally opened a closet or two, pulled out some things, cut a few vines off of an errant (understatement of the year) trumpet vine, and draped them all over the bucket of the tractor. Done.
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