It's beginning to sound alot like...the holidays!

Can you feel it? The holidays are right around the corner…Halloween, Christmas, and my personal favorite, Thanksgiving. I have a love/hate relationship with this time of year. I LOVE the idea of giving gifts, but hate how commercial it is and how much it costs me in the end. I have only great memories of going door to door collecting candy from my neighbors at Halloween, I HATE that costumes today can cost a fortune and that now I am a MOM that has to worry about my kids actually eating ALL that candy.

Regardless, Halloween is here and we finally decorated our front porch. This week after much badgering from the kids, I broke down and pulled out the decorations. I forget how much fun it is each year. We hung ghosts from the trees and put three huge pumpkins out front. The kids tried on the old costumes and put the pretzels, mini toys and of course, candy, we bought in a big bowl.

One thing I love about our neighborhood is that there are a lot of kids on our street. So with ours being the first decorated house on the street, we had kids from all over stopping to check it out. We had parents cruise by with the “Darn, I guess it’s our turn to pull out the old bins of decorations next” look. Being the newest family on the block, we had folks stop by and tell us tales of the Halloween’s past on the street.

In our old neighborhood, we had years where we had 2-4 sets of kids stop by. For a while, I thought everyone had abandoned the Halloween of my youth and headed for the mall. It was a huge disappointment for us with 4 bags of chocolate ready to be handed out by an excited pre-schooler and mommy! Thank goodness, I only buy candy I like to eat.

Our new neighbors tell us that several of our neighbors go all out with their Halloween displays and that we have scores of kids so that we better prepare at least 200 pieces of candy. As expensive as that sounds – this is the reason we moved to this over priced Silicon Valley neighborhood – kids galore and families ready to join in on the fun. Idyllic sounding, picture perfect, worth the effort – a lot of trips to the door. You bet! We can’t wait! Bring on the Holidays!