The Day After

Halloween 2010 has come and gone.

Now, in years past, I live blogged the whole Halloween thing here at the House of Peevish. It was fun and relatively easy to do. But not this year, since it was non-stop ghouls and goblins from 6:15 until after 8:00. We had about 150 kids this year, most likely because of the extensive house decorating on our street. Seriously, from the Mayor on down, so many families go all-out for Halloween, with scary music and spooky OooooOOOOOOoooooh-ing, to gardens transformed into graveyards, to smoke machines and light shows, to dead bodies under the wheels of cars and crawling out of graves.

It’s really pretty impressive, so I think that draws lots of kids. The street was jam-packed with cars yesterday evening.

But more importantly, last night was That Baby’s first Halloween. Not chronologically, maybe — she was asleep through the last two Halloweens — but definitely the first one in which she was aware and participating.

Last night, we dressed her up in her “Pooh suit”, as she calls it — her Winnie the Pooh costume. And, armed with a basket on one arm and Piglet in the other, off she went hand-in-hand with her daddy for her very first trick-or-treating. She can neither say “trick-or-treat” nor “thank you”, so the traditional trick-or-treat interaction consisted of much ringing of doorbells, followed by a friendly “Hi!”, and then concluded with “Bye!” and blowing kisses.

Daddy took her around to our immediate neighbours, just a couple of houses, mostly so our neighbours could see her in her costume. She doesn’t eat candy, and yet they LOADED HER UP. Li’l Girlfriend came home with a RIDICULOUS haul for, like, EIGHT houses. Candy bars and chips, a lollipop and a candy necklace… It was nutty. But she had fun, before it got too bitterly cold.

Then, she came home, and we got her gear off, and her job was to help me distribute candy.

This consisted of her, sitting in the foyer with a cup of milk, a blankie, and her purple comfy chair, and shrieking with excitement and shouting, “KIDS! KIIIIIIIIIDDDDDSSSSS!!!!” whenever the doorbell rang. At which point, if she wasn’t doing a hippity-hoppity dance of excitement all over the foyer, she would bring a packet of candy over to the door and heave it in the direction of some poor confused child’s bag. Then, once the kids left, she’d shout “BYYYYYYEEEE!” and slam the door. At which point, she would run back to her chair, spin around, plop down, and say “MOAR KIDS! MOAR KIDS!” very insistently.

This went on for an hour or so. Even as BDH was carrying her off to bed, you could hear her say “kids!!” whenever the doorbell rang.

She was WIPED OUT after all the excitement, and slept good and hard until 7 o’clock this morning.

This morning, as the neighbours were out heading off to work and getting their kids off to school, a few were cleaning up and the decorations and removing the dead bodies from under the wheels of their car from the night before, and boxing everything up for another year. That Baby seemed to have no ill effects from the night before, and, in fact, seemed to have forgotten all about it. Breakfast went on as normal.

But as we started to get ready to go to swimming lessons, and went into the foyer to get her coat and shoes on, she sat down beside the pumpkin decorations that we had not yet put away and said, hopefully, “More kids?”

I had to tell her no, there would be no more kids this year.

She took it better than I had expected. But next year, when candy becomes OMGCANDYISTEHBESTTHINGEVARRRRRRR, I anticipate there will be a lot more sadness, and probably a bit of a Halloween Hangover, when the sun rises on November and all our decorations and costumes have to be put away.