Maborikaigan Trick or Treat

This year for Halloween we all dressed up as shadows.  It was one of our easiest costumes yet.  I purchased the masks and black latex gloves.  I also bought black buckets, but I needed to buy trick-or-treating buckets anyway, so I wasn't really counting those.  For the rest of the costumes the kids just found black clothing in their closets and we were set.  It was very easy and didn't cost very much at all.

The kids were so in love with the costumes.  They had a blast trying to hide in the shadows and sneak around everywhere.  It was great.

Calista was happy to put the mask on just like everyone else, but she did not want to keep it on.  Instead she wanted us to keep putting it on her over and over again every couple of minutes.  She usually kept it on for 30 second increments and that was it.  The gloves she kept on even shorter.

Calista actually stayed home and passed out candy with Bob.  He said she loved giving out the candy and putting it into everyone's buckets.  Based on the amount of candy we passed out I'd guess we had about 200 trick-or-treaters.  Bob and Calista just sat at the front door, and although it wasn't nonstop crowds, there weren't long pauses between kids coming either. 

Leon did really well in his costume.  He was wearing what are normally his church pants, and I thought he might ruin them with crawling around and general five your old boys stuff, but it wasn't a problem.

Penelope and Scarlett had so much fun trying to trick me on who was who.  I accidentally mixed them up once and they thought it was hilarious.  They even went so far as to switch bows on me to try to trick me even more.

 Tucker was the most into blending into the shadows and kept asking me if I could see him.

Bob and I also dressed up.  I kept taking my mask off to talk to people.  I would see people in the neighborhood I knew and felt like I needed to take off my mask to say hi, otherwise they didn't know who we were.

We didn't even go to all the houses in our section of the neighborhood before we had our fill.  I think we went for about an hour and a half.  Trick-or-treating is more of an American thing and not really something that is done in Japan.  So every year someone organizes this and makes a map of participating homes.  Then those houses get a matching sign so the kids know where to stop.  It is pretty cool, there is no time wasted on waiting on doorsteps for people to answer the door who aren't home.  It isn't only the Americans who participate.  Lots of our Japanese neighbors passed out candy and walked around as well.

Once it started to get dark we headed home.  Our costumes were really too dangerous to be outside walking on roads in the dark. 

This year we also went to our ward Trunk-or-Treat event and trick-or-treating on base.  I could have easily not gone on base and I think I'll try to talk the kids out of it next year.  Three times is just too many, and our little neighborhood one is so great the base trip wasn't necessary.