Happy Haloween!

This Halloween was full of tricks (someone else bought my Heyburn house) and treats (a temple trip and an amazing fireside with Elder Uchtdorf) and it pretty much lasted the whole week.

"Halloween" began with our branch FHE/party on Monday.

Seeing as how it was a Church-related event, I decided to go the scriptural costume route and dressed as the very first Sister Missionary: Abish .

We had a costume contest and played some fun games, one of which involved rewriting Christmas Carols to make them Halloween Susans....get it? Christmas Carols & Halloween Susans......Never mind.

After each group had some time to rewrite their chosen song, they sang us the new version. We enjoyed the sweet strains of "Harry the Scarecrow was a big and frightening beast, with a great straw hat and bib overalls and two legs made out of sticks...", sang along with "The people are really scary, the people are really scary, the people are really scary, but the candy is good. The witches will fly and goblins will growl. The vampires will BITE and the werewolves will howl. Now give me some yummy candy, now give me some yummy candy...", but the serious favorite was "The Five Days of Halloween" with the "five flying ghosts, four screaming witches, three trick or treaters, two black cats, and a pumpkin in a dark patch."

Halloween continued at school all week long as the kidlets read the script for a classic Twilight Zone episode and then watched the real thing in all it's black-and-white glory. Wednesday afternoon was spent turning my classroom into a haunted-cemetery-maze for our school book club party. I tried to take some photos of the freak-tastic maze that the yearbook jedi helped me create, but the dark room-strobe light combination wasn't really conducive to photography. I did, however, get a shot of me in my other costume for the year...Harry Potter...along with one creative kidlet who decided to dress up as my favorite HP character: Sirius Black.

By the time the "real" Halloween rolled around, I was ready for some Halloween excitement that didn't involve destroying and reassembling my classroom. Thankfully, Krystal decided to throw a Halloween shindig at her house, so all I had to do was dress-up and show-up.

Actually, we all dressed up. Krystal went as a wonderfully frumpy old lady, Emily was a scarecrow, Zealanda dressed as Alice from Twilight, Katie was a purrrrfect cat woman, and I decided to do a repeat performance of my Harry Potter impression.

And since it is no fun to dress up if nobody is around to see it, we decided to do a litle trick or treating of our own. We stopped by Emily's "Sweet Momma's house" (who is, by the way, very sweet, despite the fact that she is not Em's "Momma"), then headed over to harass the Jones before stopping by Eric's house to drop of a card and sing a very pathetic version of "Happy Birthday." Then we were off to the Barlows and then to the Barkers where they let me answer the door for some of their trick-or-treaters ...which may not have been a good idea considering three of my kidlets saw me there. I tried to tell them I was just visiting and didn't actually live there... but I do take full responsibility for any t.p.-ing that may or may not happen at that location in the near future.

After our adventures in rural trick-or-treating, we went back to Krystal's for some delicious Halloween-themed treats...

... and a few rousing games on the wii, which I have absolutely no talent for whatsoever.

It was a great evening, full of food, friends, and fun. But then, as the proverbial icing on the cake or cherry on top, a perfect Halloween was made even better by the end of daylight savings time.

As much as I love dressing up and hanging out and visiting around and eating between, SLEEPING IN is still my most preferred prepositional activity.