it was still halloween

I almost dreaded last night. Halloween has been, for the past four years, one of my favorite days. A combination of parties and school events and neighborhood parades and, just, good friends living next door and up the street and around the corner, made Halloween in Charlottesville pretty unbeatable. So Halloween in New York, after out cancelled trip, well, I wasn't super enthused.
And it was different. It was not small town Halloween. At our sweet little neighborhood trick or treating we did not get candy from the folks in the liquor store. But when you live on a street full of doorman-less apartment buildings, you can't exactly walk up and ring a doorbell. Well you could, but it probably wouldn't go that well. So we went down to Broadway (hey, how many kids can say that they trick or treat on Broadway? Ok, so it's way up from that Broadway, but it's still Broadway) where the liquor store was feeling generous, the Hagen Daz was not, and the Presbyterian Church was set up as a haunted house complete with cobwebs and bat shadows coming from the belfry and remote control, ahem, I mean REAL ghosts flying around above us.
And the playgarden put on a nice little party with a haunted slide, candy, hot chocolate. and glowsticks, which are always the highlight of the night for my kids. Well, that and counting how many pieces of candy they have so they can sell them to me (ten cents a pop, Both kids are about $10 richer today).

It was nice. It wasn't our norm, but it was fun. Colder, darker fun, those few hundred miles between there and here make a big difference on when the sun goes down. But it will be fun to look back on "that Halloween we spent in New York", where someone dressed up as a giant cockroach and the lady making Hot Chocolate for everyone had been making it for Playgarden Halloween parties since 1968. Where every single girl in Evelyn's class dressed up as a butterfly, bee or ladybug and the prizes for fourth and fifth place in the best pumpkin contest were $20 gift certificates for espresso (in the kids category, who knows what the adults got!)

And despite living on a college campus, I only saw one inappropriate costume (but it was WAAAAY inappropriate. Let's just say it was so small that it revealed too much on both ends, but the kids were too busy conning the Cuban restaurant's bartender into giving them double candy to notice) and one slightly inebriated fray boy, who was nevertheless sitting out in front of his house dressed as one of the green squeaky men from Toy Story handing out candy. Come to think of it. I wonder it that was a hazing thing. Poor guy. We'll just pretend he was imbibing to ward off the chill.