Halloween unpacking

Jack had a play date after school, but Kate and I had important business. It's October 1st, so we had to get all the Halloween stuff out of the attic.

It's a huge orange container about the size of a coffee table, and it has our outside decorations, inside decorations, and the stuff the kids have made on Halloweens past. And the books we've gradually accumulated, like Dragon's Halloween, Masie's Halloween, Runaway Pumpkin, and a dozen others. We've been reading them for years and years and I hope we are still reading them a decade from now or longer.

I found pictures of them from past trips to pumpkin patches, where we got some of the decorations we have now. Crafts they made years ago, bat hats and cutout Frankenstein monsters. Vampire and witch pez dispensers. Stuffed ghosts, black cats, monsters. Wind up ghosts and vampires. Kate's first Halloween costume. Jacks first carved pumpkin -- ew! Nah, just kidding.

Kate and I pulled everything out and strung it up all around the house. When I was putting something up outside, she put on a black wig and witch hat and cackled. We read Runaway Pumpkin and laughed, and she pointed out things in the pictures that I had never noticed before. "And that chicken is like BAWK, and that chicken is all BA-Kawk!"

Together we decorated windows with gel cling ghosts and pumpkins from years ago. Still good! She said, "Put the haunted house on a hill, like that," and "Let's put a pumpkin in a tree. It's a pumpkin tree!"

Halloween is here! And we've got 30 more days of it this year!