"Say Trick-or-Treat!!" "Say 'Thank you!'"

If I said those lines once on Monday night, I said them half a billion times. If I had a dollar for every time I said it, we could put a dent in the national... wait, nevermind. I never claimed to be good at math.

This was Johnny's third Halloween, but it may as well have been his first, seeing as he was a sleeping infant in a monkey suit on the first one, at eight weeks old, and a crawling lion at the second one, just after his first birthday. This was the first year we actually tried to do any trick or treating, the first year he got to experience candy, the first year he was lucid enough to halfway "get" what was going on.

And because of that, I went a little nuts. I won't lie. Like with birthdays and other festive occasions, I have a tendency to go big. Not big in the "spend a college fund on it" kind of way, but big in the "invite a trillion people and make a lot of plans" kind of way. Since this was our first "real" Halloween with Johnny, I took it upon myself to recruit our friends to do a giant group costume with us, and then I invited a herd of parents and kids over to our house after the downtown trick or treating to eat and nab a few more bites of candy from my neighbors.

bamm bamm by meganstuke

The Flintstones Crew by meganstuke

(Thanks to Lindsey Taylor for the photos)

But my penchant for "going big" isn't the only reason I wanted to make much of Halloween. I recently read a blog on this subject by my sister's best friend, Amy, who lives in China, and she far more aptly explained my feelings on this than I can. The gist is that Halloween is sort of about "taking back the streets." Halloween, when I was growing up, was about being turned loose in my neighborhood and knocking on every door. It was about seeing everyone outside at once, greeting neighbors old and new, sharing an experience as a community. So much of what we do, we do behind closed doors, or in our back yards. Halloween is a rare occasion when everyone comes out the front door, opens the front door to others, and invites the entire community into the front lawn.

http://wellcommons.com/users/meganstu... (Thanks to Amber Nickel for the photo)

At the house we lived in before this one, I'd often want to sit out front in the evenings. My husband hated it, and repeatedly asked that we take our cocktails or evening breather in the back yard "Where we have the nice privacy fence!" But I preferred the rocking chairs out front, where I could wave at people walking their dogs, chat with the neighbor who was working in his lawn, and see the cars going by - even if they were going too fast. I'm a front porch kind of girl, and Halloween is the embodiment of that.

I got a total thrill walking up and down Massachusetts Street with Johnny, coaching him to say "Trick-or-Treat" and "Thank you" to all our "neighbors" downtown. I loved seeing every single costume and bustling along with the people in my community. I loved seeing the neighbors' kids on the street, and feeling the magic of walking with Johnny up to the doors of people we haven't yet met, and seeing them greet us not with suspicion or dread, but with genuine smiles - happy to open that front door and give a tiny gift to a little boy who lives down the street.

Long live Halloween. Maybe I'll organize a Halloween-In-April event so we can use those front doors twice a year.