Welcome to November! On the positive side, I have most of my christmas shopping done – and wrapped! On the negative side, Arizona is back on Mountain time, since we don’t change for Daylight Savings. Therefore, I have about 16 or 17 weeks to go until DST returns once again and Arizona is on Pacific time.

If you’re wondering why I care – I’m a morning person and on Mountain time, everything – webinars, TV shows, virtual meetings are all an hour later. It makes a big difference in the evenings.

However, it’s also time for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun with Randy Seaver, who has posed a Halloween-themed challenge this week:

Hey boys and girls, it’s only one day after Hallowe’en, and time for some Saturday Night Genealogy Fun! 

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along – cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1) Think about your most memorable Hallowe’en – was it when you were a child (candy, games, carnivals), a teenager (tricks and treats), or an adult (perhaps a party)?

I think we’ve had this challenge in the past because I seem to remember writing about taking my son up and down our street trick or treating.

However, for myself, I don’t have any one special Halloween memory. They were all, in Passaic, quite heavenly because I lived right across the street from two u-shaped apartment buildings, each with four entrances and three floors, plus several basement apartments.

It didn’t take the neighborhood kids very long to figure out that dense-packed doors yielded way more candy in less time than walking from house to house on the rest of our street!

If my memory is correct, we were allowed to trick or treat from dusk until 9:00 PM. Then Mom took charge of the candy! I was allowed to pick out a handful of candy that I really like and the rest was to be eaten over at least a week’s time. Looking back at the amount of candy in my bag, that was more than fair.

I do remember that I never liked my costumes very much. Mom wasn’t very creative and she didn’t like sewing so my costumes were always the packages bought in the store that had the slip on clothing and a mask.

By the time I moved to Wayne, I was almost 12 and most of the kids, on the brink of junior high, thought that going door to door was for “babies.”

Thanks, Randy, for this week’s challenge. It’s sad that nowadays very few kids trick or treat because of the worries about what some sick people might hand out. I guess, for safety reasons, churches and children’s organizations host Halloween parties for their members, but that isn’t nearly the fun of trick or treating in neighborhoods. We’ve only had two children come to our door in the fifteen years that we’ve lived here and they lived next door.