How to avoid trick or treating

We are now on a 3-year roll of avoiding full-on trick or treating. It’s not that we are completely anti-sugar or at all anti-Halloween. (After all, I am the Mom who went a little nuts on the costume this year.)

It’s really just that we are slackers.

Two years ago, we managed to wiggle out of Halloween by taking Zora along for a November 1 wedding (Happy 2nd Anniversary, by the way, to Colin and Anne!). This, of course, meant an October 31 rehearsal and dinner, a dinner after which, having a had a bit too much wine, I became awfully confused about why the streets of Minneapolis were filled with people in odd costumes. What, I wondered, had the clubbing scene in the Twin Cities turned into?

Last year, after a few hours at a far-away church for a church meeting, I drove back home and realized that I was pooped, Zora didn’t really KNOW it was Halloween, and what I really wanted to do was hole up in the house with Erik and Zora. Erik felt the same way, and we just didn’t go.

She’s had costumes every year. At that wedding rehearsal, she was tooling around through the church in an elephant costume. Last year, she was a lion both for her preschool party and for a brilliant Halloween dinner at some church friends’ home.

This year, we figured the gig was up. She was going to insist on the trick or treating, right?

Well, here’s what happened: in the last few weeks, things fell together for significant portions of people from my family to gather at a cottage in the dunes on southern Lake Michigan. We didn’t think we could swing it with the church obligations on Saturday and Sunday. But then, we decided to go anyway, with me sort of “commuting” the three hours back for church stuff.

Zora did go trick or treating, but it was more of a one-stop-deal at my Aunt’s neighbor’s house on our way home Sunday night.

I’m guessing, though, that this is REALLY the end of the non-trick-or-treating years.

But, who knows what will come up in 2011?

One Response to “How to avoid trick or treating”

  1. Susie Says:

    You are my hero :)