A Coleman Halloween

This is a notable Halloween for many reasons. It's our first in Minnesota, our first without Cate (unfortunately) and the first one where Colleen truly gets it.

I have two good friends who each have kids who got invited to last-minute parties. Neither is a big fan of Halloween this year, and I can't say I particularly was either. I much prefer staying home and handing out candy, letting Cate and the kids come back with all the stories and maybe taking whichever children are old enough back out for a second round after the youngest are too tired to continue.

So I was dreading it, a little bit. I'm not a big fan of chaos and this is a day rife with it. But for those who know me, I'll have you know, I kept my cool all the way through.

Cate did a great job of laying the groundwork before she went out of town, and mom has a great archive of costumes to choose from. Colleen's pumpkin and Robert's devil are Coleman classics. Elizabeth is a vampire witch. (The cape is apparently the vampire part.) She didn't want to wear the hat, but I asked her if she would wear it for the group photo and she ended up keeping it on most of the night.

And in addition, it was incredible weather for trick or treating. There were a ton, just a ton of kids out there tonight. We went to a party at the local park, where they had a few activities for the kids that kept them occupied for perhaps a half-hour. One of the rooms had been converted into a space ship having landed on a foreign planet, and upon learning it didn't have a name, Elizabeth dubbed it Xzandorf. (Google this word later. Currently it's not in the database at all.)

So the plan (and it was Cate's, and it was a good one) was to trick-or-treat on the way home. Robert picked out a particularly interesting-looking house on 43rd Street and walked up. This is Colleen's first full-understanding experience of the event, and the porch was a little scary. (Flash lit it all up here, so not even nearly the same atmosphere.) Red lighting, a skeleton, and a spider that crawled down from the ceiling. But she stuck it out, got her candy and even said thank you most times. Though sometimes she was off message, with you're welcome. Or pumpkin. Or trick or treat.

There were a lot of really interesting houses, but only one which Colleen wouldn't go near. Neighbors up the hill had a whole setup, with people sitting on the lawn next to the stairs ready to scare you, a horror movie-masked person on the sidewalk, someone with a microphone hiding in the trees describing who was walking by, a fire pit, etc.

The strangest thing we got? Probably the Cool Ranch Doritos. Lots of mini Snickers, Baby Ruths, and the like. Missing from our youth, the red hots, the candy corn and other loose items. There wasn't a single apple, no popcorn, no Now & Laters, very few Smarties.

And we had another meeting of the generations. The old Coleman rule was you could eat whatever you wanted on Oct. 31, to the point of getting sick, and that was it. Cate and I favor the kids being able to get to bed, so we limit them to three things tonight ... and we'll figure out how to parcel out the rest as the days go by.

I thought Colleen was going to give me trouble with the three pieces rule. She couldn't decide which three she wanted, or more accurately she would decide and then change her mind. So she would start to grab something else, and I would ask her if she wanted to trade one of her three pieces for it. She was always willing, though, and didn't complain too much when the contents of the bag went away for the night.

They will get help disposing of it, no doubt. Even Elizabeth, who went to the trouble of taking an inventory of her haul. I told her that was only going to make for trouble later.

I can only hope our friends had nights that were as good as this was.

More pictures, on my Facebook page (public).