31 Days of Halloween - Day 31

Halloween is allegedly the holiday people spend the most money on every year besides Christmas. My guess is that most of that money is spent on candy and costumes, since many retail outlets often have their Christmas stuff going out on the floors at about the same time their Christmas stuff does, with not a lot of lead time for Halloween and more and more for Christmas. I have a hard time believing that billions of dollars are being spent on Halloween decor since I've noticed that the houses that put up any outdoor decorations for Halloween have become pretty scarce.

Because of that, I've always made a real effort to make the outside of our house a beacon for trick-or-treaters, the one magical house in the neighborhood that gives them their real sense of "wow" for Halloween Night.

The catch though is that I don't put any decorations out until the last schools has passed through the neighborhood on Halloween day, and I take them all down in the middle of the night some time after the last trick-or-treater has long gone to bed. This way it's as if the decorations have all magically appeared and disappeared.

Our yard got to be pretty spectacular for a few years. Lately, because of logistics of the way our yard is (with no trees out front, and no outside outlets on the house to plug anything into), it's a little more sparse. But there's still something out there to ad a bit of holiday magic to the street.

Photographing our yard in the heat of setting up and attending to trick-or-treaters ends up being pretty spotty, at best, but you can see the way our yard has looked in the past beginning with 2006. Images and commentary can be found here, here, here, here, here, and here.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!