Here & There

One of the more amusing traditions I have in the post-Halloween season is what I call 'Here & There' (sometimes known as: Oh, look what I found!) This is yet another of my little yearly traditions at our house that invariably happens year after year. How does Here & There work? Well, as I pointed out in previous posts, most of our Halloween decorations actually come down the weekend BEFORE Halloween. I know this seems odd, but the sheer enormity of the job, and the crazy amount of items we have dictate this rule. The outside decorations come down on Halloween night for the most part, with a few that I might have missed or were too tired to bother with coming down on All Souls Day.

This is where Here & There begins.

Putting away the Halloween stuff for another year is bittersweet. On the one hand, the decorations have been up for over a month - so when it's time for them to come down, it's time. On the other - it's cool living in a house that's completely transformed for that short span of time. It's a big job and I wonder each year how in the heck it's all going to fit into the orange and black Rubbermaids we have in our crawlspace (sometimes they don't - and we have to add yet another Rubbermaid to our collection and hope it fits in with the rest under the stairs). But, once the job is done, it's a relief to know that it's all packed safely away and life can once again return to normal...

Except I will find a Halloween candle-holder here. Going about my daily routines I will stumble across a string of Halloween lights there ("How did I miss those?") Oh, look - I found this necklace that was part of my daughter's Halloween costume. Here's some prizes I bought for next year's party in this Target bag in the bedroom. There's some black plastic tablecloths in the crawl-space I missed ("I must have walked past those a hundred times!") Here's the jack-'o-lantern guts scooper/scraper thing. There's another set of vampire teeth ("Where do these keep coming from?") You see what I mean? We are now entering into the second week of November and I am STILL playing Here & There - and I fully expect this strange custom to continue for the rest of...

Oh, look - here's a...

Commercial Tradition

Okay so I have one other Halloween tradition (well, All Souls Day, technically) that I'm not so proud of. Sure, I rant about how commercial Halloween has become - I lecture and I preach about keeping it old fashioned and remembering traditions of the past. So what do I do each year? Why, head on out the next morning to hit the 50% OFF sales to pick up the few goodies that happened to catch my eye over the past month.

The jack-'o-lantern cookie jar seen above is one of them. Half price at Target ($10.00), I've had my eye on this one and was willing to push and shove old ladies out of my way to get it! I wasn't impressed with most of what Target had to offer, but this will take a place of honor in our kitchen the whole year 'round!