Well Halloween 2007 has come and gone - and what a great night it was. I didn’t get to set up a few things the way I originally wanted to: the woods Scene Setter doesn’t go all the way up the sides due to a lack of a sufficient height ladder and I didn’t get to setup the tent in the driveway (aka The Tomb of Vile Goodies). Actually in the end, the table worked out better because everyone wanted to come up the walkway anyways. The wind earlier around dusk and near the end of the evening played a little havoc on the facade. And for some reason the fog rarely left the left side of the yard.
Overall though it was a fantastic evening and 2007 by far blew away what I’ve done in 2005 and 2006 by a long shot. For the first time I felt like a celebrity as I had so many adult and teens taking photo’s with their cameras and cellphones, some having their kids pose with me or one or more of the props. Nearly every adult had nothing but complimentary things to say. One teenage girl said she was posting the pictures she took on her Myspace page (i’ll have to track down a link to that for here). A few of the smaller kids were a little scared to enter but most eventually worked up the nerve at the coaxing of their parents. One woman even says I should go into the business professional (thanks, but I feel I have a lot more ummm boning up to do).
The best compliment was from someone I never expected. While cleaning up and putting stuff away for the night the town police stopped in front of my house (they’ve been patrolling the neighborhood since about 8:30pm or so) and rolled their window down. I was expecting to get reprimanded for maybe have the music too loud at almost 10pm. Instead they just wanted to tell me that I had the best house they had seen all evening (for sanity’s sake I did ask about the volume which turned out to be fine).
Overall I think we saw nearly 200 TOTs (not including parents) based on the 7+ large bags of candy we nearly depleted. Head over to the Halloween section to see more pictures from the evening.
What a great night… Now to start planning for next year - looking at either Black Magic or Pirates next year. I think we’ll actually try and keep a real tally of the TOTs as well as take more pictures of the traffic coming through.