Trick Or Treat
November 5th, 2007This Halloween Sean was determined he wanted to be Optimus Prime from Transformers. There was never any other options. We did give in and buy the helmet but the rest was home made. As of two weeks ago his costume consisted of a pile of broken down boxes in the computer work room. The pile had been there for several weeks but I had been unable to figure out how to turn it into Optimus Prime despite Googling the subject to death.
Finally I gave in and made the first cut. After two weeks of cutting, gluing, painting, and a brief encounter with a needle, some fishing line and some elastic the costume to your left was produced. (Click on the photograph for whole gallery.) It had a lot of things I wished were better but Sean loved it. For one afternoon and evening he WAS Optimus Prime!
First we went to the Farmville Downtown Parade where the kids walk up and down Main Street and the retailers and organizations give out candy. Sean got lots and lots of kudos for his costume. There were many exclamations of “It’s Optimus Prime!” “Great Costume!” and “Best Costume of the day!” Sean seemed to get more of a buzz from the attention than the candy.
After the parade we headed home for a while and Sean handed out candy in costume from our front porch. Then we headed out to go trick-or-treating. A quick stop in at Barnes and Noble for some Starbucks sustenance for Mommy and Daddy and we found they were handing out candy so Sean came in with his costume. Then we headed up to High Street.
Last year High Street was teeming with trick-or-treaters and a large number of the residents seemed to be participating. Many of the residents had gone to a lot of trouble decorating their houses and some even provided haunted areas to walk through before a candy reward was distributed. We figured that would be a good place for Sean since it was difficult for him moving around in the costume so we needed a decent size concentration of houses to visit. We started at Leigh and Marcus’ house and then headed down the hill and ended up a good way down before we hit another house taking part in the festivities. Then we walked almost all the way back up before hitting any further houses. Thankfully several houses at that point where accepting trick-or-treaters but by this point the poor wee boy was tired out and the curfew for trick-or-treating was upon us. We offered Sean the idea of removing the leggings so he could walk faster but he was determined to keep the whole thing on.
Thankfully Sean was still getting more fun out of the reaction to his costume than the actual candy collected. He got a lot of attention from the other trick-or-treaters so the lack of houses to visit wasn’t such an issue. The houses we did visit really seemed to enjoy his costume and appreciated seeing a home made effort.
I’m not sure why there was so much less participation this year. There were even yards decorated for Halloween but the occupants of the house were not participating. I know it can get annoying with the attitude of some of the trick-or-treaters** but the majority taking part are well in the spirit and the kids just love Halloween. Lon and I both agreed that we would actually put it in our plus column of a potential residence if it got good trick-or-treat traffic. We fully intend to go all out for the trick-or-treaters who come to us when Sean gets too old to go trick-or-treating.
Anyway, we had an AWESOME Halloween and we had one very happy wee Optimus Prime.
Happy Halloween!!
** To illustrate our understanding of the negative behavior from the trick-or-treaters we had one older girl who came with her family to our house this year. First of all she wasn’t in costume although the younger kids in the family were and second she tried to grab a huge handful of candy from the bowl seriously depleting our stock. Eventually her Mom told her to not be greedy. She walked away with the handful she had managed to grab and looked it over then started muttering about about how she didn’t “… like no lollipops and no fruit-flavor candies.” Then when we took Sean out we left a bowl full of candy for anyone who came by. When we got back we expected the candy to be gone but not the bowl too!
