Making Halloween Better for the Kids
Preserving the Magic
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This one is for every adult who loves Halloween and wants to make it special for others. This could be helping one’s children with their costumes or taking them trick-or-treating. It could be putting up elaborate decorations for others to enjoy. It could involve working with one’s neighbors to promote safety. Whatever you do to keep Halloween alive, thank you!
The Best House in the Neighborhood
When I was a child who had the good fortune to be trick-or-treating, one house in my neighborhood always stood out. I suppose one had to cheat a bit to consider it as being in my neighborhood. It was about as far as we’d go from our houses. It was well worth the trip.
The man who owned the house loved Halloween as much as we did. Based on the amount of work he put into it, he might have loved it more than we did! We looked forward to what he’d have in store for us every year. And no, it wasn’t the candy that got us so excited.
He locked himself in his garage for several weeks before Halloween. He built all his own decorations. They wouldn’t go up until a couple of days before the holiday. Even then, the best ones wouldn’t come out until the sun began to set on Halloween. Those were the ones that brought us to his home.
This was long before animatronic decorations were available in stores. Yet somehow, he managed to build his own. He was the only one who ever had decorations that sometimes moved. We weren’t sure how he did it. It seemed like sorcery to us.
Three Ingredients to Amazing Decorations
There were three things that made his Halloween decorations unbeatable. The first was that he always created a focal point. As we approached, an array of decorations would pull our eyes to wherever he wanted them. They were so cool that we couldn’t look away. That was by design. With us focused elsewhere, we didn’t notice the trap he was about to spring.
