Someone in my neighborhood decided that Saturday, October 29th, would be our official “trick or treat” night. I don’t remember a discussion or being asked or voting on it or anything like that. Someone I don’t know announced the change on my neighborhood’s Facebook page, the official source of information for what’s happening in my neighborhood, and that was that. Fortunately my wife saw the announcement and had our candy bowl ready, else we would have been confused the first time children in costumes rang our bell Saturday night which, and I think I’ve already made my point here, was not Halloween.
Morgan had a band competition in Tulsa on Saturday, which Susan attentded. I was feeling under the weather, which left me home alone. I decided to spend the evening streaming Halloween tunes on Twitch to hundreds dozens of listeners. I figured out a way to loop the video from my Ring doorbell into my stream, so viewers of my stream could watch in real time as kids (like this one, dressed as a banana) knocked on our door.
One of the things I used during my stream was my Pixoo-64 digital screen. The app has thousands and thousands of animated pictures to choose from and so I was constantly changing the picture to match the music I was playing in real time. There’s a one-second delay between when you select the picture and when it appears on the stream so I got pretty good at timing when to tap the picture on my phone. There were hundreds and hundreds of Halloween-related pictures available so I didn’t come anywhere close to running out of pictures to display.
When I heard our neighborhood changed trick-or-treating from Monday (10/31) to Saturday (10/29), the first thing I said was, “betcha we have some trick-or-treaters on Halloween night, too.” After all, as a kid, that’s what I would have done! Sure enough, several groups of children with parents who either let them visit from a nearby neighborhood or simply didn’t read Facebook rang our bell on Halloween. Fortunately we had plenty of goodies leftover to hand out.
I never keep an official tally but I think we had about 50 kids visit Saturday evening with another 10 visiting on Halloween. I’m semi convinced a couple of the kids I saw Saturday night came back on Monday — an act I believe deserves reward, not admonishment.
We didn’t put out a whole lot of Halloween decorations this year and so there isn’t much picking up to do, save for a bowl full of bubble gum and a 12′ skeleton in my backyard.