Best. Halloween. Ever.

I like Halloween, I guess.

I'm not a gung-ho, holy-crap-it's-finally-October, horror-movie-marathon kinda guy. People where I work ask me what my costume will be, and I'm like, "Eh...same as last year, maybe? Chef gear? Or whatever my daughter wants us to dress up as...?" I just don't care that much. Plus, I spent so many Halloween nights working that I kinda lost the internal drive to care. The same thing happened with the Super Bowl.

Anyway, I have a nice Indian suit---like a nice dressy suit from India---that Corrie brought home from her trip 20+ years ago that I wore this year. People where I work said, "Eh, what're you supposed to be, Sherwood?"

I answered, "I'm a cultural appropriator." Half the people I told that to said, "Huh?" They other half laughed uproariously and said, "Good one!" That was worth it just for that.

But this year marked the first year since the kids were born that we had to figure trick-or-treating out for ourselves. Each year so far we've just taken part in Linda's Daycare trick-or-treat event, which tended to be on, like, October 28th at the sunny hour of 3:30 pm. The kids would walk up and down Nipomo Ave (where the home daycare resided) and knock on the obviously-pre-arranged neighbors' doors and that would be that. Now that Camille and Cassius are at the same school, we kinda had to figure it out.

Before the real festivities of the evening occurred, there was the "parade" at school, where the kids can dress up fully in their costumes (masks too, whereas masks are otherwise verboten) and walk around the grounds and be cheered on and photographed by parents. I missed this, Corrie was there to snap a picture of Cass, wearing both his normal costume (Ghostface, from the movie Scream (which he's yet to see)), as well as showing off his love for the newly vanquished:

Corrie wasn't really feeling up to it, but we pushed through. It got dark enough by 6, and we corralled the babies just well enough to get their costumes ready and them into the car. See, we can't trick-or-treat around our place, since we live in an urban hellscape environment with very little obvious front-door action. That was just another reason to keep going to Linda's for as long as we did.

So instead of our neighborhood, we drove up Atlantic to Cal Heights, a nice neighborhood where Corrie has some clients:

The drive was about ten or fifteen minutes. Corrie took the right turn into the zone and we slowed down. "Do you seen any groups of kids?" she asked. After slowly rolling through a few intersections, we spotted some walkers, Corrie pulled a nearly reckless U-turn and Ace Ventura-ed her Subaru up to the curb. "Let's do this!" she exclaimed as the kids' excitement was just beginning to burble.

All of a sudden, it turned out, we were surrounded by a few hundred people, clogging all sidewalks on all streets around where we'd parked. We just got out, started right at that house, and it was on. 

We followed the few houses before heading left with the sidewalk, and followed it all the way to a school. Nearly every place was decorated and buzzing. The air was just cool enough to feel like Fall, but not to where you'd be chilly.

Some houses had displays that were unmanned, like the witches coven above. Corrie took all of these photos and I grabbed them from her. There was so much color and charm and music and excitement all along the entire street and, really, all the streets in Cal Heights on this evening that it made me long for that kind of thing for our kids. Raising urban, city-kids is cool and all, but you'll never get THIS kind of excitement. 

Anyway, one house had a whole group of adults handing out candy like they were waiting for the bus:

Cass ditched the jersey (on the left)

As we were walking away, we asked Camille, "What do you say?" She got back into line, but not to get candy, arther to say 'thank you' to each person individually. The last person was laughing so hard he gave her another handful of candy.

Pretty soon after this, Camille was tearing ass from house to house, leaving us in the dust, screeching as she went along, "They gave me MORE candy!" and soon after, "I HAVE SO MUCH CANDY!"

This skeleton is at least 10' tall

It was hard enough work keeping up with her. Eventually I trailed her as Corrie and Cass brought up the rear. Camille is at an age and gender that is socially allowed to disregard social etiquette when it comes to queuing for candy. Since it was so crowded, the littlest, blondest girls were kinda allowed to run amok, despite their own parents' protests.

I was not in costume at this time, but I did have on my large union affiliated hoodie, and I got plenty of compliments and shout-outs, which was very nice.

The whole thing took less than 20 minutes. We went a few houses, turned left with the sidewalk, went up a few blocks to the school, came back down the opposite side, crossed our first street, and went up and back a few houses and absconded to the car. Hit almost all three of the Tao of Steve's rules.

We got home just after 7, put on some Treehouse of Horror episodes, and sifted through SO MUCH CANDY, to quote the littlest blond one, for what we all liked.

It was easily my new favorite Halloween.

[[Totally unrelated aside: (as seen in the map above) notable Poly High alums: Billie Jean King, Tony Gwynn, Snoop Dogg, and Cameron Diaz, amongst many others.]]