Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!  We "partied" quite a bit this year!  Here are some of our standard Halloween placemats, fake pumpkins, and Halloween signs we put up in the house.  We added some pumpkin lanterns and made Frankenstein dessert.

We also got around to our much wanted Pottery Barn signs that we copied for 10% of the price...literally.  And, we found a place to hang the last of our ghosts and pumpkins that used to float in trees of other houses.  Here in our neighborhood, your house actually stands out if you don't have decorations outside!

Our neighborhood is referred to as the "American neighborhood."  It's probably the largest concentration of Americans (other than the base) in one group of houses.  Because of this, Halloween here is phenomenally CRAZY!  To head this off, a couple nights (Oct. 29) before the actual holiday, they have an optional trick-or-treat night.  We took advantage of that, dressed up, got out, and passed out our candy.  Here's, in order of age, Snow White, Cleopatra, a witch, Optimus Prime (from the Transformers), and Cinderella.

 *Dear Wal-Mart, thank you for making your 360 count bags of Tootsie Rolls available on-line with free shipping.  I promise we will go through all 12 bags you kindly sent to us:

On Halloween morning, I took McKenna up to base where they have an annual work/office trick-or-treating event.  All the offices and businesses in the actual "office building" where Jeremy works decorate their entrances and hand out candy to the military and government "tots."  Here's the entrance to Jeremy's work...very appropriate:

Here's McKenna with one of her very good friends (McKenna had had it with the "sensory overload" at this point) who was born six weeks after her, also in Georgia.  Her dad was Jeremy's immediate boss there and we are thrilled to be able to hang out some more in another location.

We were invited to a co-workers house around the corner for pizza and snacks and such right before trick-or-treating.

 

And Halloween night...let's just say that the neighborhood "committee" has the police come in and shut all the roads and entrances from an hour beforehand to an hour afterwards.  They also bring in a medical crew.  The reason you need 2,000-4,000 pieces of candy is because you are going to hand that much out and you will probably still run out.  It's as though 1/2 of Singapore shows up...it's actually something you have to think about when considering living here!  I think we definitely had more than 4,320 pieces in those 12 bags.  I was handing out 2-6 pieces as fast as I could and didn't run out until an hour and forty-five minutes later.  There was still a crowd out for another 45 minutes after that...atleast.  Here's a picture down our street just at the beginning:

Happy Halloween!!!