You are both right about hypocrites.
MauEvig wrote: ↑Tue Oct 10, 2023 7:26 pm
I guess I'm a bit self conscious, my grandma used to vehemently voice her opinion against me dressing up or having ANYTHING to do with Halloween.
Believe me, I know exactly what you mean, I think every family has someone that tries to force their ways on other family members. My father ruined almost every birthday, holiday, and vacation we had when we were kids. I know that it wasn't directly his fault because of the way that he was raised, but just because he was miserable, it doesn't mean that he had to make everyone else miserable. Thankfully, my mother eventually came to her senses and got rid of him, and after that we had some of the most fun and memorable moments in our lives.
I can decorate and dress up however I want.
Absolutely! As far as I'm concerned, as long as your collecting and hobbies makes you happy, and it's not harming anyone, then you should be able to do what you want, and it doesn't matter what other people think, just live your life and be happy.
As for your grandmother, I don't know how things are between the both of you now, but like you said, just let her live her own way, and wish her the best.
When I was living on my own before I met my wife, I always dressed up to hand out candy to the trick-or-treaters. I looked forward to their costumes, and it was fun to watch them enjoy the holiday like I did growing up. I always gave out full sized candy bars for the best costumes, and we still do that to this day. I just love the look on their faces when I answered the door dressed as the Wolfman, Michael Myers, Spider-Man, or Darth Vader to give them candy.
About pet costumes, we only tried once to dress up our cat, and she wasn't fussy about it, she wore the costume and didn't complain, but she looked so weird that we felt bad for her and got rid of it.
Murfreesboro wrote: ↑Tue Oct 10, 2023 8:38 pm
When I was little, you ToTed in your neighborhood, but now it's all about who decorates.
You're absolutely right about that Murf, in my area trick-or-treating has been in decline for years, as every year less people give out candy, and less kids go trick-or-treating. But in 2020 at the height of the pandemic, that was the first year that I actually had to get in the car and drive the kids to another area to go trick-or-treating, as there wasn't any houses in our neighborhood, aside from ours, that was decorated or giving out candy, and I've had to drive them to other areas the last 2 years for trick-or-treating. I hope we won't have to do that this year, but if I have to then I will.
On Halloween night we are the only house on our street that is decorated now, there are others in the neighborhood, but not on our street. My wife told me that only about 50 trick-or-treaters showed up in 2020, and we got about 80 kids a year since then, but those numbers are way down from previous years, as we used to get a few hundred kids showing up every year until about 2017, after that there were a bunch of people in our neighborhood that just stopped decorating.
Back in 2009 we were living somewhere else, and the lowest amount of trick-or-treaters that ever showed up was 4 kids for the whole night, but that's because it was raining like crazy that night. Honestly, if we knew the last kid was going to be the last kid for the night, we would have gave him the whole bowl of candy. My wife, who I was still dating at the time, and I, had to eat that pile of candy by ourselves.
