Where you won't find me on Halloween...

You won't find me in a costume on Halloween.

I love everything about this day. (Well, no, that's technically not true. Not everything. I'm not at all into the uber-creepfest or trampy-dressing part of Halloween. I am all about achieving a High Cuteness Quotient, but that's not important right now.)

And while I enjoy making costumes, I don't usually dress up.
I know. Is that weird?

I mean, I LOVE that my kids dress up and I LOVE helping them pull costumes together. In fact, I also help design and create the costumes for their drama productions. See here and here.

But me? I'm just not the dressing-up sort.
And I'm usually not to be found in Halloween pictures (I realized this today as I was searching my archived Halloween photos and found that I was missing from most of them). That's probably just the control-freak in me who believes I'm the onlyone who knows how to effectively "capture" the moment. Or maybe I just have latent scary-clown issues. Or it could just be that I always had those lame box-and-mask costumes when I was a kid - not really worth even a snapshot, so I gave up on the costume thing early on. (Whatever. I'll work it out with my therapist. =D)

Besides, I like to be behind the camera.

It took us Cubans a while to catch on to how the whole Halloween thing worked here in the U.S. anyway. In retrospect, it's surprising that we (my Cuban family of origin) didn't get more into it. After all, we used to dress up elaborately for Carnival every year and we even used to dress in costume for birthday parties in Cuba. What was up with that? (This is just one of those things that I'm going to have to wait until I get to heaven to ask God about personally, because I'm certainly not getting any satisfactory answers this side of eternity. =D)

Eric & me with Adam (Where's Waldo?) and Amy (50's bobby-soxer. She totally wanted to wear the saddle shoes. =D) - 1991.

Once I got old enough, I decided to establish my own Halloween traditions, mostly for my kids.
I LOVE all the kids in costumes.
I love the preparations.
The carved pumpkins.
The decorations.

I love the sweet sounds of "Trick or Treat!" at my door.

Eric & Me with Jonathan (cow) and Lucy (baseball player - She totally wanted to wear the high-tops. =D) - 1996.

But I still don't like to dress up.

Lucy, me & Jonathan. Disney's California Adventures Candy Corn Acres. 2008
(We took this on Wednesday of this week. =D)

Tonight we will have a houseful of young people.
We'll feed them mass quantities of age-appropriate-young-people-Halloween-food.
There will be lots of sweet goodness for dessert.
And my people will be dressed in fabulous costumes.

And I'm thinking that maybe this is the year I will "be something" for Halloween...