2 weeks until Halloween
Halloween is my hubby's favorite holiday (although he does love Christmas even if he complains I go overboard lol). He's got 3 bins of creepy decorations at this point and every year we add to his piles of stuff. I am especially excited about the bloody gel handprints I found to stick in our front window. So delightfully gross. We've also acquired, from our local Dollarama, a ferocious looking plastic rat with red eyes and fanglike teeth, a rope with styrofoam skulls and a new plaque that reads 'Unload the dead bodies at he back.' Lol. Gotta love Halloween.
Still on the list to do, other than decorate the day before, is hit the pumpkin farm where we will visit the smelly animals and listen to the kids giggle because they saw something poop. Scream in disgust as the cow eats a corn on the cob from our hands and slimes us. Run wild through the twelve foot tall corn maze (which I'll admit, even in daylight, is kind of freaky). Ooh and watch the cannon launch pumpkins to explode in the field. The kids love watching the splatter. Okay, I'll admit it, I enjoy it too 
Then there's the wagon ride into the field itself where my son and hubby hunt for the biggest freakn'pumpkin they can find. My oldest daughter looks for a large but perfectly round one. Then there's the little one who grabs one, declares it's perfect, then puts it down, then grabs another, then changes her mind. This goes on for a while. Me, I get a small, green striped one that I can carry easily along with the little one's once she settles on the perfect one.
Carving is an all afternoon affair, with hubby diving in right alongside the kids creating masterpieces. The children like to follow a paper pattern, but my hubby loves to get inventive. For several years, we had the puking pumpkin, always a hit. Last year, we had the pooping pumpkin sitting on a potty hubby built replete with toilet paper, and a fresh pie crust courtesy of me. Ooh, and a pig pureed pile of pumpkin mush right under our pumpkins butt in the pie shell. The sign of course read 'Fresh Pumpkin Pie'. Perhaps not original, but damn did we laugh our faces off.
Another tradition too, that I follow courtesy of my paranoid mother, is the sorting of the candy bags once they get home. Despite my not understanding it, people still do nasty things to kids candy instead of turning off their porch light. So every year, I dump that candy out and I look for things that are unwrapped, homemade, or just plain weird looking. Those get trashed. Then I pull out the stuff my kids won't eat, that languish in the cupboard. I yank the bowl of good candy I bought for trick-or-treaters and replace it with the stuff my kids hate lol. I know, horrible of me. Anybody else do that?
One of these years I hope I can get over my self consciousness and actually dress up for the occasion. I'd love to be one of those parents who dons the wig, makeup and outfit, embarrassing their kids royally. LOL, seems like so much fun if I wasn't such a wussy. While it won't happen this year, maybe it will the next.
What about you? Are you doing anything special for Halloween? Do you have any traditions? And is it just in Canada that the porch light rule exists?
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