Fireworks and Fireflies: a socially distanced twist on Halloween

October is usually a super busy month for our family.

It starts in the single digits with celebrating Caleb, usually with a family dinner at his favorite restaurant on the actual day and a birthday party with his "fab 5" group within the week. This year it looked like home-made Pad See Ew (we offered takeout, but he pointed out I've gotten pretty good creating Thai dishes during this pandemic) and no party.

Usually sometime in the "teens" of October we have our big night at the State Fair. Obviously that didn't happen this year.

Moving into the third week we celebrate Nat, again usually the same way ~ dinner followed by a party. Again, no party.

Then during the last week we've celebrated for years Caleb's forever family day with his "China brother" Henry and his family, usually by going to a Pumpkin Patch. This year our two equally cautious families chose not to brave crowds at a farm.

And then of course there is this silly little night called Halloween. Are we detecting a theme just yet?

Not ones to totally toss tradition into the wind, we decided to hit the highlights and make the best of the day.

It started with a five store search for pumpkins. We'll just go with, "If you haven't waited until Halloween day to look for pumpkins before, I don't recommend it." Costco, Trader Joes, Wal-Mart and Lidl had all sold out, it was Food Lion to the rescue. And when I say rescue, we had to dig deep into the giant cardboard box to find eight that weren't already beginning to rot. And dig even deeper to find eight that still had intact stems without mold. I think there were about two to spare.

But there were eight pumpkins.

And so we'll say that Food Lion saved the day!

So we scooped.

And we traced.

And traced some more...

And we carved.

For dinner I had planned to make Fettuccine Alfredo. But at some point during the day someone had mentioned something about the "fun" Halloween foods I've looked up on Pinterest and ~~actually somewhat successfully~~ recreated in recent years when we've hosted our Trick-or-Treating friends. I decided that if I could find everything I needed at Costco on the pumpkin run (they were our first stop and while they let us down on pumpkins, they saved Halloween fun dinner) that we'd have a "spooky dinner."

Mummy dogs, chips and spooky spiderweb guac and a veggie skeleton

You can't have "spooky dinner" without "spooky dessert," can you? We decided no. For several years running we've made a tradition of going to our favorite frozen custard shop on the first night they serve pumpkin custard for the fall. This year...thanks to Covid...we missed "premier pumpkin night." But it is served on Halloween. So off we went!

yeah ~ one shoe, one flip flop.
whatevs.
not the hill i was willing to die on tonight.

When we got home several thought the night was over. But pumpkins, spooky dinner and dessert weren't all the fun. The best part of Halloween is trick-or-treating to fill up those pumpkins with candy. While we couldn't quite recreate going from door to door with friends, we did create an in home candy scavenger hunt that took the crew from room to room in the house. Never you mind that the boy's reaction to "you have to all work and travel through the house together" was met with tying themselves together in pairs with jumpropes. No children were harmed during the searching for candy in this episode.

fashioning their "partner connectors"

catching candy being tossed by a sibling after finding the first cache

with many beds to check, "now i am in your bed, look under where you lay your head" took a few tries

While we missed being out and about in the neighborhood, one tradition was pretty much like every other year (though we did miss having Darby and Henry here with us)...the Great Candy Swap.

An advantage to having your parents buy all the candy is that only everyone's favorites were purchased. None of that "cheap yucky candy" here. The bargaining went on for some time until everyone was rather satisfied with their stash.

And while everyone else was treating themselves to a few treat bucket favorites, our budding photographer slipped outside to check out the rare Halloween Blue Moon.