Pre Halloween Activities

One of the things I remember most from my childhood, and I don't remember that much, is all our family holiday traditions. Even now that I'm an adult, I still feel robbed if we somehow don't fit the major traditions in. The first tradition I remember is decorating for the holidays. Ever since we first got married, I had a meager but existent holiday decor budget to start my collection. I limited myself to one tote for Christmas and one for all the other holidays when we moved to Alaska, but I'm happy to say my Halloween decorations were up about the middle of September :)! Sydney and I made Halloween sugar cookies again this year, but this time we didn't frost them all at once. We frosted a few, waited til they were all gone and then frosted more a few days later, etc. etc. I like that tradition because we got to do the funnest part in my opinion, decorating, more than once. While in Texas earlier this month we had decorated pumpkins with pipe cleaners and on Monday, Sydney got her first real carving experience. She was excited to pick out the pumpkins, not so excited about what as inside them though as you can tell from her face below. Andy helped her draw the face and she was thrilled when we put a candle inside and let her keep it in her room for a while. She named hers Jack and mine Jill. The last of our Halloween activities so far involved making haunted Gingerbread houses with some friends last weekend. Again Sydney loved eating the candy and randomly placing it on the house, but she has a hard time understanding why we can't just eat her house now. I had to move them higher up out of her line of sight because she constantly got frustrated at the fact that we said we had to wait to eat them because they were like decorations now. I understand that I could just let her eat it, but with all the other treats around right now we don't really need nasty cement candy. Our trunk or treat is tomorrow night. I'm excited to see how much more she understands and gets into the festivities this year since last year she was really confused and didn't understand what was going on. Happy Halloween!