So let me preface by saying that everybody has their own certain holiday that excites them. You may dig Thanksgiving and the great food that comes along with it followed by the prevalent Black Friday. You might be a sucker for Valentine's Day with your significant other. Christmas season might have you feel jolly, same for Hanukkah. But what holiday happens to excite me?

Halloween.

This is the one day of the year you get to freeload candy from fellow neighbors where as a kid you got all the good candies and as a parent you get a potential cavity nightmare and best schedule a dentist visit soon after to clean out the teeth! For people giving candy it inadvertently serves as a means to build relation with people within your neighborhood. With that, it continues the important(IMO!) tradition of giving out candy to kids to encourage the crazy and nifty costumes and festivities that go alongside it. 

So I figure lets get this thread out of the way with a little over 3 weeks to go before we get this awesome day out of the way. From favorite candies to potential Halloween costumes to potential scary horror flicks/video games/theme binging, there's certainly something for everybody on this awesome time of the year. It can be the pumpkin flavor coffee or pastries, something. 

Any plans for Halloween 2019? Costume shopping already or DIYing it? 

Halloween isn’t really celebrated here but it’s slowly catching on even though it takes place in Spring here. Most people’s response is “fuck off with that American shit” but that attitude seems to be wearing off especially with the younger crowd.

I had about 6 groups of Trick or Treaters last year..as opposed to 0 the previous year so that was good by Australian standards.

Any public/normal holiday I’ll be working except Christmas Day
(My work was open on Xmas until this year) Boxing Day/New Years/Easter/Melbourne Cup etc just means more work so not really into them. So Halloween I make an event out of as it’s just a normal night meaning I can get it off work 😂. I need a new job.

Same as last year I’m having a Bad Movie Night Party for Halloween, have been slowly buying decorations on top of the ones I have from last year. I don’t know what I’ll dress up as...I wore face paint + long shirt/sleeves last year and it was a boiling hot today that went well 😂

I love horror so i celebrate it even though it’s the wrong season, but I’ve never experienced a winter Christmas so nothing out of the ordinary.

Cheap plug:
I’m also doing an A-Z film countdown to Halloween on my YT channel 🎃

http://instagram.com/p/Bpl8n3bgtaa

My decorations from last year, sorry for DP had to fix my Insta settings.

We just emptied our pond so it has time to dry before we use it for our outdoor cauldron (double duty). I've started decorating early this year. Every year we add more. I have a remote controlled smoke machine and lights. We use our flower beds as graveyards. Good times. Sadly, we are the only ones on our strip that decorate and hand out candy.

The most I’ve ever had was a hand full of kids in my old place, the parents weren’t impressed when I gave them all cans of Coca Cola.

We close our gates on Halloween now, just in case.

We go all out on Halloween. It’s the most wonderful time of the year in the RT household.

This year we’re straight up traumatizing our kids. My wife found a thing on the internet that is called “Doll in the Hall.” It’s like Elf on a Shelf but you place a creepy doll around your house throughout the month of October. It’s awesome.

We put it on a bookshelf on the 1st and my daughter saw it right away. She was immediately freaked out and wouldn’t even listen to our rationalizations (“maybe a friend left it here? We’ll hold onto it and see if someone claims it”). She made us put it on the porch, so we did. On Saturday I just randomly moved inside the door. She sees it and asks why it’s inside. I go “I thought you did that.”

Boom. She freaks again. “OUR HOUSE IS HAUNTED WE NEED TO CALL THE POLICE.” Meanwhile she’s telling all her friends we have a haunted doll in our house. So I come up with a plan: I hide the doll right before I go out of town for work for a week. I say I will be the only one that knows where it is and if it moves, we will throw it in the garbage.

My wife is going to move it this week while I’m gone.

...

Anyway aside from being awful parents (I assure you my kids are fine, we know where the line is and we won’t fuck them up too much), we decorate quite a bit, love the whole season, etc.

This year my costume is Fat Thor from Endgame. I have most of the costume already, I just need a wig and a Stormbreaker (so people don’t think I’m The Dude).

That's amazing RT :lol:

I have no idea what to dress as this year, every idea I have involves full clothing and masks/facepaint that would be way too hot.
Not many t-shirt/short wearing horror characters around so I might just grin and bare it.

Oct 7, 2019 23:35:09 GMT NATH45 said:

The most I’ve ever had was a hand full of kids in my old place, the parents weren’t impressed when I gave them all cans of Coca Cola.

We close our gates on Halloween now, just in case.

As opposed to giving them sugary chocolate & lollies?
🤔

Oct 15, 2019 3:30:38 GMT System said:

Oct 7, 2019 23:35:09 GMT NATH45 said:

The most I’ve ever had was a hand full of kids in my old place, the parents weren’t impressed when I gave them all cans of Coca Cola.

We close our gates on Halloween now, just in case.

As opposed to giving them sugary chocolate & lollies?
🤔

Beer it is then.

Speaking of not getting many kids, I've had some weird years as far as trick or treaters go.

When I lived in Saskatoon before my wife and I moved in together I lived with two friends in a house on a busy street that was literally across the road from a school and a community centre. Halloween rolled around and we were like "ah fuck, we're going to get like a thousand kids," so the three of us went to WalMart and bought like 8 boxes of the 150 pieces of chocolate bars.

We got one kid.

We were going to a party that night and agreed to hand out candy until around 8:30, then shut the lights off and leave. We had zero kids on our street until around 8:00, when some neighbours we knew brought their toddler over. He was dressed like a shark and really nervous, and they told us it was his first Halloween, and that we were the only house nearby with lights on so they brought him there. We laughed and showed them all the candy we had and told him he hit the jackpot, and we filled his bag. The kid almost fell over and his parents couldn't believe it.

We brought a bunch of the candy to the party and still had tons leftover.

...

Now we live in a somewhat swanky neighbourhood and last year we were told to expect anywhere from 500-1000 kids. People that have lived up here for a while told us that kids are bussed to our neighbourhood from other areas, their parents drop them off and leave for two hours, it's basically mayhem on Halloween night. So again we stocked up and made sure we had around 750 pieces of candy.

Sure enough at around 4:30 on the dot the little kids started coming out and we were like "Alright we're in for it tonight." We were skimpy on the candy but then at like 6:30-7:00 our neighbourhood became a ghost town. Some neighbours were wandering around trying to give candy away and I was out with my daughter still and houses were giving us handfuls of candy because they still had tons leftover. By 7:30 or so the streets were empty and nobody was around, and everyone was saying how weird it was, that the year before they were still getting a steady flow of kids until like 9-10:00.

We stocked up again this year just in case it was an off year. Except I keep eating it.

My decorations


Had a kid ask sandylea what a doorbell was 🤦🏻‍♀️

I just stayed home and handed out candy. Didn't even dress up this year, though I did put some decorations out. Bought a bag with 250 pieces of candy. It was all gone by 7:30. Neighborhood was packed with both children and cars coming in from other areas to bring trick or treaters into my apparently desirable neighborhood.