Halloween in the Garden City

Hmm. Still no comments. I was sure that bringing up politics would get me some reaction. Oh well - back to the more mundane. I had wanted to add that other than the snarky comments (which my Vancouver sister explained as "West Coast alienation"), it was a very nice Halloween party. Sam had a rather severe reaction on arrival, due to the dramatic face paint on the man who opened the door to us, but was soon distracted by the candy hunt in the backyard, and then felt comfortable enough to enter the house. Our next event was the Halloween dance at the girls' school, held on Thursday night. I decided to leave Sam with Dylan, and just take the Alexandra and Lily. It was a funny sort of event - like a high school dance, in the gym with loud music and a disco ball, except it was for elementary school aged children, so they were just running around smashing into other people. Lily found her friends quickly (it was completely dark in the gym except for the disco ball) and ran around with them. Alex took a little longer to locate her group, and then kept losing them in the darkness. I stood on the sidelines thinking that this job really doesn't pay enough. The attending parents seemed divided into two groups - those who wanted to dance with their kids, and those, like me, who just wanted to go home and put our kids to bed so we could watch Law and Order. Speaking of law and order, I couldn't help noticing a couple of children dressed as gangsters and sporting guns - one was a super-soaker, but one was a rather realistic looking toy rifle. As I watched the young man taking aim at various children on the dance floor I felt my stomach turn. The following morning after my volunteer duty I spotted the VP in the hallway and asked his opinion. For the record, this was the first time in my parenting history that I have ever raised an issue with my children's school. I'm pretty easy going, and I don't like to cause problems. And I certainly don't want to be a party pooper, but guns in schools make me sick for obvious reasons. The VP had been in attendance the night before, and said that he had also been concerned (he'd spotted a real set of nunchucks as part of someone's costume) and that there is a district wide policy in place about no toy weapons on school grounds, that is why they have "wear orange and black" on Halloween instead of having the kids come in costume... but the event in question had been planned and promoted by the parent's advisory committee as a fundraiser, and it was the first one they'd had, and he would be bringing up these concerns in a follow-up meeting.
That afternoon the kids came home and helped Dylan design and carve their pumpkins. They went trick-or-treating up and down our street and came home to pig out on their loot. Saturday I spotted a poster for a "Pumpkin Art" event, so after dinner we loaded into the car and went to admire hundreds of intricately carved pumpkins, grouped thematically on milk crates in an empty warehouse on a pier by Ogden Point. I enjoyed the Royal Family pumpkins and the Star Wars pumpkins and was beginning to admire the Charlie Brown pumpkins when Dylan stepped behind me and whispered in my ear "They're artificial." Sam had been begging to leave ever since his run-in with Darth Vader, so with that knowledge, we headed home. We had a little debate on the way back on the importance of them being fake. The girls didn't seem to care - they still enjoyed the display (they had even borrowed my camera to capture the pumpkin portraits of Princess Lea and the Beatles). All in all it was a very festive week, and now we can enjoy the lull until Christmas.