Halloween 2013 has now come and gone; I hope yours was a good one. This year, my family and I dressed in costumes from Harry Potter. My daughters were Ginny Weasley and Hermione Granger, my wife went as Sybil Trelawny, and I was Mad-Eye Moody, complete with wands that I hand-carved for each member of my family and a shillelagh (used in place of Moody’s wizard’s staff) that my grandmother brought back from Ireland. We got many compliments on our costumes. Good times.

The street that I live on has a reputation for doing Halloween right. Many of my neighbors stage elaborate haunted houses, there are driveway cookouts and there are numerous children living on the street so there are lots of cute little toddlers running around dressed up as pumpkins, strawberries, or teddy bears. However, we do have one problem: teenagers that come trick-or-treating with no costumes at all. This is where I become a Halloween Scrooge. I’m not saying that you have to go get a store-bought costume, but you have to make some sort of attempt at a costume. Wandering around with a Lakers baseball cap on saying that you are a basketball player does not count as a costume. Worse is when the teenager in question says, “I forgot to make a costume this year. Trick-or-treat?” I withhold candy in that case. “But Rob,” you say, “aren’t you afraid that someone is going to egg your house or worse?” No, I have no fear of that: I live next door to a cop. A tough Brooklyn cop who relocated to LA who is also in a cops-only biker gang. So, yeah, security is not too much of an issue. 🙂

Then there is the eye. I live directly across the street from my brother-in-law, who is a special-effects technician. He has a bay window that faces out to the street and each Halloween he puts up a screen behind the bay window and projects a video onto it of one gigantic eye looking around, similar to Mike Wazowski from Monsters Inc. More than a few times every Halloween we hear kids exclaiming, “Have you seen the eye house?!” Good times. I, on the other hand, know better than to try to compete with something like that. I simply put up fake spiderwebs across my entryway with a sign attached to them that says “We are across the street.”

Onward to Thanksgiving!

Take care,

~Rob