Prepping for the Main Event

I LOOOOOVE Halloween. Halloween and Easter are my all-time favorite holidays. They are both in the very best seasons and they are both so wonderful in their own ways...Easter is beautiful and reflective and awe-inspiring. Halloween is just plain silly and fun for ANYONE. The key to these 2 being my favorite? What do they have in common? CANDY. I'm not as big a fan of sweets as I used to be, but I do still love candy. I prefer fruity candy over chocolate, but in my old-age I'm starting to love chocolate more and more, too.

I love the month of October, period, really. It's autumn, (in parts of the country other than the one we live in! Ha!), and the leaves are turning colors. There's a crisp feel to the air that is always welcome after the long, hot summer. The leaves smell amazing and even moreso when someone is burning them. The decorations are so vibrant and pretty with the fall reds, oranges and yellows. There are apples to be picked, pumpkin patches to be raided and fun things going on in town all month long.

In response to one of the blogs I follow, I'm going to post about a couple of traditions we celebrate in the month of October. First there's trick-or-treat, OF COURSE! As soon as I got too old to do it myself I had kids and I get to do it again! I love trick-or-treating. I love to see all the cute little costumes and how people decorate their yards...it's so fun. There's also Fall Festival here in town. This will be our 3rd year of Fall Festival and I love carnival food, so that's my favorite part of it, but GraceAnne loves to ride the ponies and paint pumpkins. Actually--I changed my mind. My favorite part of it is watching my kids come to life seeing all the fun things! We also have a tradition of making apple butter from scratch. In WA state this was a lot easier than here, (tell those apple trees to stop discriminating against certain climate zones!), but this year we saved a little money and we're going to Lubbock to pick a bushel of apples at a 3,000 tree farm and we'll get our pumpkins there, too, because they're having a pumpkin fest the weekend we're going. First we make applesauce from the apples and then apple butter from the sauce and it's a LONG, insanely messy process, but OH SO worth it! And then there's Trunk or Treat. I love this, too. Our church puts on Trunk-or-Treat every year and we all decorate our trunks in some sort of theme, (last year we were a sweet shoppe and GraceAnne dressed up like an ice cream cone), and the kids go around and "Trunk-or-Treat" for goodies. There are some very creative trunks and it is SO fun!

Man, I wonder if I could get a few more exclamation points in there?? Can you tell I LOVE OCTOBER?? :)

Oh, and complete with Pooh Bear and the Hunny Pot up there, Allan will be Christopher Robin and I'm not sure what I'll be doing...maybe Eeyore or Rabbit. I thought about Kanga, but my Roo is a Hunny Pot, so....we'll see.