We had a lot of fun this Halloween. The Queen, Squiggle and I engaged in all the traditional Halloweenie activities. We visited a pumpkin patch:

And we got stuck in the photo hole:

(Well, one of us did, anyway.)

We got all dressed up. The Queen went as a witch. I went as Lloyd Dobler (photos forthcoming). Squiggle wanted to be a lion, so Grandma Baldwin went to work and, by gum, he was a lion.

And, as is quickly becoming our tradition, we spent Halloween in the company of some friends on Capitol Hill, whose house falls under siege every October 31st. The enormous quantity of trick-or-treaters they receive came as a surprise to us last year, but this time we knew what to expect: something akin to a 3 hour stage rush at a Raffi concert.

Sure enough, we were visited by more that 1,500 kids this year. How did we know? Because we stood just inside the door with a tally counter and enumerated each and every one. We also gave them candy, a token of our appreciation for participating in our census.

Some observations from the front lines:

• Best costume of the night: a kid dressed as a Ballot Box. His large, square outfit had two holes--one marked McCain and the other marked Obama--and you had to choose into which to deposit the candy. Second best costume(s): an entire family dressed as calacas.
• Funniest costume: A kid who dressed as himself, but he had tiny hands sticking out of his sleeves. To emphasize this point he took the opportunity usually used to say "trick or treat" to instead scream "I HAVE TINY HANDS!!!"
• Bananas and penguins, both of which were oddly ubiquitous last year, were nowhere to be seen this. Apparently their 15 minutes of fame is over. We also only saw one Palin, though this was perhaps not an age range in which you'd expect her to predominate. Plenty of Jokers, though. And every third kid was a Spider-Man. It was as if an egg sac burst nearby and 10,000 tiny Spider-Men crawled out.
• The porch of our house had an over-aggressive smoke machine. It would go off every five minutes and blanket everything in an impenetrable fog. Any kids too slow to evade the miasma of opacity would be trapped, and we would be entertained by assorted shrieks and coconuts-clonking-together sounds as kids walked into each other and banged heads. After the smoke cleared there would typically be three or four children unconscious from asphyxiation just outside the door, which the other kids would blithely walk over in their singleminded pursue of Fun-sized Twizzlers.
• A neighbor was projecting old horror movies onto the side of his house. I mean really old, like black-and-white era. And, unfortunately, it's not until you project such a film onto the side of your house that you realize that 97% of such movies consist of three characters standing around in a crypt, delivering long, boring monologues full of expository material. I don't think I ever once glanced over there and saw anything scary happening. He may as well have been showing My Dinner With Andre/
• Nobody wants the Dubble Bubble gum. Dubble Bubble just serves as packing peanuts for the other candy in your bag.