October 31st came around again.

Halloween is a one heck of a big deal here. And on a Saturday night, with good weather and an almost-full moon, it's an even bigger deal than usual.  600 + pieces of candy (one per trickster) handed out from our house in an hour and a half; you gotta love it.

Well, actually, we no longer love it; we have become the Scrooges, the Grinches of Halloween. We went to the movies, deputizing my sister and niece to do the Halloween Duty, leaving them to sit on the bottom steps in front of our house, dropping candy one by one into the bags and hats and hands of vampires, ballerinas, princesses, skeletons, pirates, a family of jelly-fish, a Haz Mat container bubbling over and one kid decked out as a kitty-litter box.  Or so they gleefully reported to us.

Our neighbor told me they had about 1400 ghouls & goblins come by. But then they have a tunnel created out of pvc pipe, covered in black plastic sheeting with spooky music, flashing lights and low-hanging cobwebs  inside.  It's a big draw. Up the street, a fella has life-sized mannequins of practically every Disney  movie character that he sets out on his lawn. He's got music too, and dry-ice fog. The crowd gets so thick in front of his house, he sets out traffic cones to keep people out of the street traffic.  Two blocks over, D Street has even more elaborate sets and houses.

Our one piece of Halloween decoration? A string of pumpkin lights I found in the basement.

Walking back from the movies, it was kinda neat to see the families and groups of kids and teens roaming the streets, the houses decked to the nines, lights still flashing in haunted houses and the spooky tunnel next door. Even at 9 p.m., some houses still had lines of trick-or-treaters, though they were short lines.

Neat enough that we'll invite my niece and sister up again next year. And we'll leave them with more candy.