Happy November

So apparently Halloween is a big deal here. Like a REALLY BIG DEAL. As a self described lover of all holidays, I should have known this already, but does anyone else agree that Halloween has fallen by the wayside since we were kids? With politically correct costumes, scares of pedofiles and anthrax candy, it just seems to have mellowed out. Not to mention constant "delays" for weather that, let get real, never work out. Well friends a place exists where you can dress as offensive as you want AND get all the candy spoils your little heart desires. 

Of course once houses like the one above started popping up on every block I decided to do a little Google research before the big night, have I mentioned I'm unemployed?  Apparently Seattle is in the top 5 cities in the country for trick-or-treating.  Not only that, but our neighborhood made the breakdown in a major way (although there are conflicting reports).

[imaged source: Zillow]

Nothing like those statistics to strike a little fear into the hearts of this penguin once we started to run out of candy...

Eventually we started to give out fruit leather with the hope that our house wouldn't get egged.  Luckily for us, Seattle kids tended to actually PREFER the fruit leather, which started all sorts of bigger picture questions in this household.  What kid prefers dehydrated fruit over high fructose corn syrup?  We were visited by a Starbucks Cup, a cute pink jellyfish, a kid about 8 dressed in a perfectly fitted tux carrying a martini glass who kept saying "shaken, not stirred" in a British accent, and even our very own Space Needle!  I wanted to take pictures but once again I was confronted with what Halloween has become and wasn't sure if taking pictures of stranger's children is socially accepted.

Overall, it was a gorgeous night with no chance of a rain cancelation (would they even try to do that in Seattle? I don't know), which ironically seemed to be the case in most other American cities this year.  I have to say though, I'm pretty impressed by the stamina of the trick or treators because as you can see from the picture below, you have to cover some pretty intense elevation changes to maximize your candy collection in this neighborhood.  

Each house has at least 15 steps to the front door.  On second thought, maybe trick-or-treating is the workout plan I've been searching for.  Better patent it like prancercise woman! (final side-note: my costume plan for this year WAS the prancercise woman, but I was still in my running clothes when the first kids showed up so I threw in the towel).

So Happy November!  Go get a Starbucks Red Cup!!!!!