324

That's how many trick-or-treaters (or as my family calls them, halloweenies) that we had visit our house last night in two hours.

That's a pretty good year. I don't think it's a record. The second year we lived in our house, the weather was warm and kids were out for a long time, even young ones. That year I think we topped 350.

Most people I've talked to say that they get anywhere from 30-50 kids. Why do we get so many more? We live on the corner of a pretty busy street and we live on a cul de sac.

Plus Greg puts some effort into our decorations. This year, we had the traditional full-size mummy man, fog machines, black lightbulbs, and strobe lights. Yes, plural strobe lights. I now have epilepsy.

Trick-or-treating started at 6:00 and Greg started off around the neighborhood with the girls. I sat in a lawn chair on the new front porch and waited (we never bother to sit inside or you'd just have the front door open all night).

I had two kids come up. The little ones are pretty freaked out by the mummy, so I'd call, "It's OK. We're nice! It's just pretend." Then I waited and looked down the street to see who else was coming.

There was a group of kids coming out of the house across the street and some came around the corner and some appeared from up the hill and within 3 minutes, I had 25 or so kids. Then in another 5 minutes, I was already up to 50 kids. Yes, we keep track. It's a tradition in my family.

We made it most of the way through the 2 hours before we ran out of candy, until about 7:40. That's pretty good--the first year we lived here, we had no idea of what to expect and we ran out of candy in 20 minutes. Greg ran back to the store twice before we gave up and turned out the light.

We're cash-poor now because we spent all of our money on candy (literally about $50), but at least we had fun. Happy belated Halloween to you!