An American Halloween Experience

Halloween season is upon us. You read that right; it’s an entire season for us. To some, it may be a one-night holiday, but to our family and many others, it’s a month-long event. We wait for October 1st with anticipation, dig through storage and prepare all the decorations to adorn our home. We hunt for the best jack-o-lantern pumpkins to carve. Our children start counting down the days until Halloween, try on their costumes numerous times, decide on a completely new costume, and then revert back to the original at the last minute. For parents, it’s beautiful and frustrating at the same time.

Decorations are paramount to the Halloween experience. We can’t feel like the Addams family without everything covered in fake cobwebs, right? The beauty of Halloween is that there is such a wide range of decoration styles to try. The season is different for everyone. Decorations can be gory and scary, splattered with fake blood and make the front yard look like a crime scene; or they can be whimsical and fun, with a skeleton wearing an N95 mask and holding hand sanitizer. The options are endless. Haunted house attractions are available just about everywhere as well. They’re especially adept at conveying that strange sense of fear, where you know it’s all fake, but you still jump when a deep growl or scream comes from the end of a pitch-black hallway. Then there are trunk-or-treat events, where community members convene in a parking lot and hand out candy to the younger children from a decorated truck bed or trunk of a car. Halloween here is available in just about any flavor imaginable.

Halloween is available for all ages to enjoy. Do you want to dress up as an old witch and hand out candy on your front porch? Go for it. Want to pair your costume with your partner? We do. Embrace being something different for the night; the kids sure do. Halloween presents that great opportunity for kids to be whatever they want for the night. Imagine a child who is a bit shy; Halloween allows them to transform themselves into a confident superhero with an overstuffed bag of candy. Upon arriving back home, it’s all about the score: who got the best candy, how much is Mom and Dad’s candy tax going to cost this year, who wants to make trades? We have four children, so our living room floor becomes a minefield of candy piles as half-costumed kids navigate the art of gummy bear deals. 

Our Halloween experience is about family. It’s about the smile on our young twins’ faces every time we pull into the driveway and they see the decorations all lit up. It’s about our two teenagers teaching their little siblings which neighborhood gives out the best candy, or hustling them in a bad candy trade. It’s about scaring my wife by putting a werewolf mask on and hiding around the corner. We unconditionally love Halloween, and the fun memories and traditions we get to create together.