The Witching Hour Approaches

I arrived home today and found a notice for a Halloween party tomorrow night at the clubhouse in my apartment complex. That’s too bad because I am not ready for Halloween…

It seems this Halloween has caught me with my proverbial pants down. I haven’t managed to decorate for it, or even decide what we should do. I haven’t lived in an apartment complex in so long, I don’t even know what the protocol is for Halloween and kids.

If we were in a house in a neighborhood? No brainer. Trick-or-treating. Or maybe a party, if I had friends here who were having one, like a friend that moved away a while back (before I then moved away too) who had the most awesome Halloween parties every year complete with costume contest and a huge bonfire in her backyard. Those were good times…

But no. Instead I am here, considering my options in the one week I have before the big day and I am bummed out. I don’t think I’ll manage to get any decorations up for it this year–they would be up for less than a week then I would have to take them down again… too much work for very little return unfortunately.  I have been toying with the idea of taking them to a haunted house (eek!) or seeing a scary movie (like the Carrie remake) or doing something super safe and non-scary, like taking them to a Harvest fair at one of the local churches.

I did that a lot in the past when they were smaller, and when I was going to church regularly, and the neighborhood we lived in when they were much smaller had no sidewalks (this was Virginia afterall…) and I didn’t like the idea of walking in the streets in the dark. My church put on a huge Harvest Fest for the community and it was a lot of fun. When they got older, and we had bought our second house, and it was in a neighborhood with sidewalks, I took the kids trick-or-treating. Good times…

I love Halloween. I guess I never outgrew the wicked cool notion of dressing up or having an excuse to put on a costume. I was, unfortunately, married to a stick in the mud who was too (stupid, uncool, awkward?) and boring to want to dress up with me. So come Halloween time, I was the only one of the two of us who would be in costume when it came time to go door to door with the kids to get their treats. What a loser… so not cool.

Discovering that I am one week away and unprepared reminds me of the melancholy I felt when I wrote about having the pre-holiday blues. Sure, I may have moved into this apartment three months ago, but I had nothing up until last month, and I am not even done unpacking. It’s just hard. Sure it’s a bunch of excuses, but I really could have used an additional week of preparation, in fact, I could have used not having lost a week’s worth of productivity last week. That stinks.

I hope to rally some energy this weekend and make a last gasp to do something about the holiday. I don’t know if we will make it to the shindig tomorrow unless I can dig up a costume for my kids that they had from the years prior. At least I am crafty enough to be able to come up with something decent at the last minute. I hate to miss out.

You only get one chance at a holiday, then it’s just gone forever. So we’ll see. It’s not over yet, but there isn’t much time to waste.

In the words of one of my professors: Whatever you do, make it memorable…