Halloween 2019
Started: 2019-11-10 13:43:07
Submitted: 2019-11-10 16:22:01
Visibility: World-readable
In which the intrepid narrator's children dress up for Halloween
For Halloween, Calvin decided that he wanted to take a Boba Fett costume, paint it black and orange, and call it "Calvin Fett" -- in the tradition of embracing and extending Mandalorian armor for the next generation. (This, presumably, would place him as the obvious successor to Boba Fett.)
Acquiring an off-the-shelf Boba Fett costume was easy enough. Then Calvin colonized the dining room table, laid down plastic sheeting in an attempt to protect the table, and started painting the costume with fabric paint. He wanted to paint almost all of the costume, and then continue to decorate the painted fabric with decorations of the opposite color.
My main contribution to the costume was to help Calvin decorate the helmet. I got him to mask over the section of the helmet he didn't want painted, then he painted the rest of it black, and dabbed it with some orange paint.
I don't know what aesthetic Calvin was going for, but he seemed happy with the end result.
At the same time Calvin was deciding on his costume, I suggested to Julian that he could dress up as Pikachu, and he took to that idea. I selected a couple of Pokeballs to outfit me as the trainer; though in the end my employer didn't have an invite-your-kids Halloween party this year and our au pair Alejandra took Julian around the neighborhood for trick-or-treating, so I gave her the Pokeballs so she could play the Pokemon trainer.
I did, at least, get a picture of my hand holding a Pokeball as if to catch Julian-as-Pikachu.
And I took advantage of the augmented reality camera inside the Pokemon Go game to prove that, while Julian was dressed up as Pikachu, Pikachu was also dressed up for the holiday.
Calvin went to go trick-or-treating at his friend Simon's house in Ballard. Our neighborhood was quieter; we got only one confirmed visitor, and that was our neighbor. Alejandra reported that people were more active on the named streets (running north-and-south through Wallingford on longer blocks), but were not as active on the numbered streets (running east-and-west on shorter blocks). I kept track of the weight of the candy bowl to estimate how much of our candy we'd given away; but the results were too depressing to report.
While sitting in the family room with the bowl of candy in front of me to give away to children who never arrived the thought occurred to me that perhaps Halloween decorations would be in order to attract people to our house. We didn't have time to acquire and set up any non-trivial decorations (since Halloween evening was already well underway) so I considered whether I could cobble together something vaguely resembling a Halloween decoration using only what we had on-hand and came up with the idea of building a cardboard box jack-o-lantern, using the orange and black spay-paint we had left over from Calvin's costume. I left the bowl of candy on the front porch and retreated to the garage to build and paint the cardboard boxes, ending up with something vaguely like a boxy snowman but painted orange. I placed it on the front garden but it failed to attract any additional attention. (When I returned the bowl was slightly lighter, indicating either that someone (or some animal) had taken candy, or that there was a flaw in my methodology.)
My decoration did, however, attract an offering of several persimmons, presumably from our tree in the front yard.
Calvin ended up with a generous selection of candy. We let him eat whatever he wanted on the first night, then had him select seven more pieces (presumably to be eaten on the following week, though we didn't quite manage to implement that as intended), and hid the rest away.
Our children enjoyed their Halloween, and I think we managed to give them the American cultural experience they deserved.
