All Hallow's Eve

Not many of you, I dare to speculate, have ever been handed

by your incredibly creative son, a rather spooky,

(and incredibly cute) Q-Tip skeleton!

I LOVE this skeleton!

I'm thinking it may have to be a Thanksgiving skeleton...

perhaps a Valentine's Day or an Easter skeleton.

I may not have the heart to put it in storage for an entire eleven months.

Halloween at the Wing house was pretty darn awesome this year.

I was feeling melancholy about this holiday...it's such a Wing family holiday.

Mom and Dad and Idaho Springs....

strobe lights and a smoke machine,

music from the upstairs window,

a flying bat on the porch,

kids screaming for candy while Uncle Kev counts the hundreds,

(and I mean three to four hundred)

of trick or treaters...

the Cowboy Band on the lawn

and, of course, cold weather.

I missed it all....

okay,

all of it but the cold weather.

While Colorado dealt with a very early, very heavy snowfall,

(there was 40 inches of the white stuff at my parents' house in Evergreen...)

we enjoyed a balmy night in the mid 70's,

a clear sky with a nearly full moon and a sprinkling of stars

and a nice, warm breeze.

Maya was thrilled that her genie/vampire costume wasn't spoiled

by a cumbersome, (not to mention dumb turtle neck) or a winter parka.

Scott, on the other hand, was soaked in sweat by the time he hauled

his more than generous load of candy back to the homestead.

Maya couldn't talk after putting her fangs in...

but her silence didn't last long. She was yelling

"Trick or treat!" & "Thank you!"

as clearly as the other kids before she'd visited her fourth house.

Scott gave up on his fangs and did his trick or treating journey

as a wizard minus the vampire part.

Neither kid chose to take their plastic pumpkins out with them this year.

Ah...made me sad. They took pillowcases instead and it wound up

being a good thing, too. East coast families don't give away

small amounts of candy as we found out, but put anywhere from 5 - 10

assorted pieces together in either a ziploc or a decorated paper bag.

The pumpkins would NEVER have held all the loot they raked in.

It definitely wasn't Idaho Springs...

nor was it the Wings. We missed them a lot.

But we did have a good holiday...and we'll have candy

for months. Stop by on the 4th of July...

there will probably still be candy...and, most likely,

my awesome Q-Tip skeleton hanging on the wall.