Trick or Treat

It’s coming…or should I say “They’re coming”…Halloween is around the corner and all those neighborhood children adorned in their costume finery will come knocking on the door.  Whether you still have little ones of your own at home or now its grandbabies that make your cheeks hurt from all the smiling, who can resist a precious little one in a costume so excited to be going door to door and collecting all that sugar…aka candy.  I love it!  And my husband Randy loves it even more!  Each year he hands out the biggest candy bars he can buy in the hopes that in years to come, adults who used to be the children trick or treating in our neighborhood, will drive their children past our home, point out of the window of their cars at our house and exclaim with great fondness, “The people in that house always gave the best candy every year!”The best part of Halloween is that it can bring out the child in all of us.  I don’t mean the ghoulish awful fear provoking nonsense that some people get caught up in.   I mean the joy of seeing young ones dressed up and pretending to be all sorts of characters from firemen and nurses to knights and princesses and bumblebees and robots and superheroes of all kinds…the list goes on and on.  It can be a magical experience for a child (or an adult) to dress as someone that lives in their imagination and  become that person for a night. Even the youngest child who may not know what, or who, it is that he or she is being dressed up as, knows the delight they see on the faces of the adults who love them and they get right into the part.  This is such an underrated but important part of childhood learning.  Even Albert Einstein said “Imagination is more important than knowledge.”

Last year when our 2 youngest granddaughters, Evangeline and Ashton were just barely 1 year old and not quite 1 respectively, they were two Munchkins who accompanied “Dorothy Gale from Kansas” (aka our then 4 year old Savannah) as they made the rounds of the neighborhood delighting everyone they met along the way.

Sadie, our then 5 year old, was an Asian princess and you can see from her face she was having a ball at her school parade.

Even after Halloween our children used to love to dress up.  Now our grandchildren have hours of fun in the costumes I keep here at our home, just for that purpose.

Rainy afternoon and you don’t know what to do with restless kids, or too hot to be outside, or the dreaded “I’m bored.  What can we do?” days…pull out some costumes and watch the fun begin. Now is a great time to buy some of those costumes to keep at home for those kinds of days when you need to make some fun.  Shop Amazon  – Kids Halloween Store, it has a great selection and the prices are very reasonable.  For not much money you can spark the imagination of those children you love.

      Sometimes you don’t even need a whole costume……just a hat or a sword or a princess cap or slippers will do the trick, and you will be the one who enjoys the treat 🙂 These are the little things that make life seem so much more full of love, joy and abundant living!

p.s. You might be wondering who was inside that Star War’s Chewbacca getup at the top of the page…..yep…. that would be Randy….I told you he loves Halloween!