Halloween 2021
Started: 2021-11-22 17:10:54
Submitted: 2021-11-22 18:52:15
Visibility: World-readable
Finally something returns to normal
In the Second Plague Year, Halloween returned mostly to normal. My family is three-quarters vaccinated, and we once again live in a neighborhood with actual sidewalks where some of the neighbors stockpile candy to give out to trick-or-treaters. (In fact one of the people living in a house on an out-of-the-way street begged Kiesa to come trick-or-treat there, since otherwise very few people would make it that far away.)
Kiesa decorated the skeleton librarian in our front yard with a crow on her shoulder, and another crow perched on a light on the stairs leading up to our front door.
The local live crows, though, didn't seem to appreciate our decorative crows. One afternoon I heard a murder of crows cawing in the front yard, clearly agitated by something. They flocked in the birch tree above the sidewalk and flew around in circles for half an hour before flying off somewhere else.
We also ended up with adhesive vinyl stickers on the second-floor windows (several bats in flight and a black cat) but I don't have good pictures of them because it's hard to get a good picture of the black stickers on the windows.
Julian painted a pumpkin, rather than carving it. I am not actually sure what design he ended up painting on his pumpkin; it looked too abstract to me to understand what it was.
For Halloween itself, Julian wore an off-the-shelf Charmander costume, continuing his tradition of wearing Pokemon costumes.
Calvin wore something considerably more abstract, which involved a long black coat, a duffel bag, goggles, and a hat. When he went trick-or-treating around the neighborhood after dark, he wrapped himself in yellow caution tape in an attempt to improve his visibility. I am not sure if this added to or detracted from the desired effect of the costume, because I am not sure what the desired effect of the costume was.
I gave Kiesa a Pokeball and a jaunty jacket so she could play a Pokemon trainer as she took the kids around the neighborhood.
Kiesa and the kids went trick-or-treating around our neighborhood (equipped with a Pokeball for her costume and an LED lantern for light), and when they came back the kids spread out and sorted their candy on the dining table.
Calvin sorted his candy into piles by type. Julian went several steps further and sorted his candy into groups by color, and then proceeded to draw a bar graph and color it in with the number of pieces of each candy he received of each color.
The text under each column describes the color (with creative phonetic spelling). From the left, this is brown, red, blue, silver, green, orange, and yellow.
The kids enjoyed their relatively-normal Halloween this year.
