Let me tell you about Halloween in my neighborhood.

As an adult, I've never enjoyed Halloween. I outgrew my love of Halloween around middle school, some 25+ years ago. But now I live in a neighborhood where Halloween is absolute over-the-top insanity, and you really have no choice but to get into it, or leave town for pretty much the entire month of October.

There are thousands upon thousands of trick-or-treaters who come from all over the town to trick-or-treat in the neighborhood, and Halloween night is very much like a big carnival. Every year there is some sort of unofficial contest to see who can come up with the best decorations. Here are few examples from around the neighborhood.

This house was on the local news last year. They were filming right as we trick-or-treated, and my son, who was dressed up as Queen Elsa, walked right past the camera. People were giving me a hard time about the possibility of my son appearing on Fox News in a dress.  LOL.

This is my good friend's house - the forbidden forest from Harry Potter. We were walking home from my parents' house a few weeks ago, and my daughter wanted to take the long route home just so we could walk through the forest. Her husband was out working on it when we passed through.

This is a new display this year, and I think it's one of my favorites.

Even if you're too young to remember Thriller, the zombies coming out of the ground are cool. My son likes it.

A few weeks before Halloween, random 'booing' starts. This is when someone rings your doorbell and leaves you candy. (To clarify, 'you' = my daughter.) This one happened after my daughter was already in bed, so I took a picture of it for her because I didn't want to leave the candy on the porch all night.

I got more into Halloween this year, just because. Why not? By 'got more into it,' I mean that I let my husband go crazy without rolling my eyes every time he came home from Kmart with a new tacky decoration. However, I did decide to throw a pre-trick-or-treating party. Our friends started the tradition of 'soup night' years ago, and we used to enjoy going to their house for soup before trick-or-treating. Unfortunately, they moved out of the neighborhood, and I figured that someone should carry on the tradition. So I spent most of Friday and Saturday cleaning and cooking, and preparing my house to be invaded by 30+ people. Here are a few pictures, simply because my house has not been this clean and a very, very, VERY long time.

      

I had so much fun cleaning and cooking, even though even the most low-key parties are always a ton of work (and money!). In reflecting on it, I think it's because it was the most normal I have felt in over five months. It's the first real, get down on my hands and knees cleaning I've done in, like, forever. And I LOVED it. Cleaning and cooking and worrying about how all these people are going to fit into my house just made me feel like my life is normal again. There is a normal life to be lived past cancer. For two days, I hardly thought about cancer or surgery or what body parts were hurting. I just put my head down and scrubbed the toilet and scrubbed potatoes and stirred the soup. It was an amazing feeling.

When I was at BRA Day, one of the other patients who gave a talk was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was pregnant, and had a double mastectomy at 31 weeks pregnant. She had to wait until after the baby was born to do reconstruction, because being under that long might be bad for the baby. But one of things she said really stuck with me, and that is that she knew the reconstruction was a success because she never even thinks about it anymore. And I find myself having more and more days like this - where there is a good portion of the day where I just don't think about any of this stuff anymore. I just clean and cook and manage my kids and give out candy. It's a good feeling.

I think it might have been the best Halloween ever.