Halloween

What great holidays we have! I think it would be interesting to learn about all the holidays in various countries and compare them to our own. I can't imagine we wouldn't crush any country in a head to head "holiday off". We have some truly fantastic holidays. They certainly have become more commercialized which isn't all that positive, but the raw memory making potential regardless of the dollars spent is truly amazing. I look back on my childhood and holidays stand out like big shiny oyster shells on a beach. Halloween is certainly one of the "big three" kid holidays in my mind that kind of anchor the year (Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas). These three are especially helpful up here in Alaska as it gets us half way through our 7 month winter.

Enough babble...here are the kids.

So we had several Halloween festivities here which ended with the sugar filled trick or treat finale on Wednesday. The girls had a school party where they got to throw wet sponges at fellow schoolmates faces as well as a church party that involved a little hockey action for a candy reward. We also did some home activities including the ever popular pumpkin carving and face painting. Hair painting was also part of the action but we soon discovered that the way the manufacturers get the stuff to come out of the hair so easily is to make it come out easily on anything and everything (furniture, clothes, pillows, etc.). It was still worth it. Carol made a fine sculpture ghost (see photo) which was the easiest of her Halloween crafts as she also decided to hand make the girls costumes. Izzie went as a witch and Beth as a cat. Owen went back and forth between elephant and ghost. Carol first did the costume making thing in 2004 when she made Cinderella and Snow White costumes for Beth and Isabel (respectively) which they still somehow squeeze into even now. They are by far the most used dress up prop and are incredible outfits (as are the current crop this year).

Trick or treating involved two parts. We first went up to the museum at the University of Alaska - Fairbanks where the basement had been turned into a mini science museum with candy. There were various displays of science experiments as well as museum artifacts and dissected animals (much to Carol's delight). I thought it was pretty neat, although Carol thought it was a little much. Our company was fantastic as we met up with our good friends and their beautiful children. Denise won the costume contest dressing up as a Mardi Gras masked woman complete with faux leopard skin coat.

After the museum, we went to a neighborhood and did the house to house begging. It's always fun for the kids and fortunately it was unseasonably warm for this time of year at +20F (yes the plus sign is always mandatory when citing temperatures here in Fairbanks - it was -2F our first year out on Halloween). The kids had fun and will be on a sugar high for the next few weeks.

More photos here.