Halloween Fun, Bristol Style

A Little English History Lesson For You

Yes, they do celebrate Halloween in England.  In my opinion it doesn't seem to be quite as big a deal as in the US, but still celebrated non the less.  They actually celebrate "Guy Fawkes Day," or "Bonfire Day" as it often referred to, on November 5th.  Ever seen the movie "V for Vendetta?"  Well the mask that V wears is a Guy Fawkes mask.  He (and some other people) tried to blow up parliament to kill King James I, in protest of Protestant rule in 1605.  From what I understand it is a bigger deal here than Halloween.

I struggled with a lot of mommy guilt over this Halloween.  I feel like I kind of dropped the ball.  Sunday I was skimming the internet for places to trick-or-treat on Halloween and discovered that all of the public trick-or-treating events had happened on Saturday (the day before).  We don't really live in a part of the city where you can go door to door, at least I didn't feel comfortable doing so.

So, after beating myself up for a while I decided we would just have to make it special on our own without our traditional trick-or-treating.

We had fun food...

 Monster smile yogurt for breakfast
(yogurt with two apple slice "lips" and marshmallows "teeth")







Spider deviled eggs

We had decorations and treats...

We had games...

We had costumes...

Our beautiful bride, handsome big dragon, and our adorable baby dragon, who wouldn't stop playing with big dragons toenail in this picture.  (Which is why big dragon is frowning in this picture.)

Grant wasn't so sure about his costume at first.  He didn't fuss about it, but he had the most somber look on his face after I first put it on him, which is so out of character for him.

I think it finally grew on him though.

We also did "pretend trick-or-treating" where the kids went from one room of our flat to the next as I gave them candy.  It sounds ridiculous and corny, but for a 5 and 3 year old it was apparently a ton of fun.  They both seemed to love it.  The introverts in Nathan and I kind of loved it too.  Ha!   

I had all of these plans and dreams about how perfect I was going to make this day for them.  The day got off to such a rough start when all 3, yes all THREE, kids were in my room at 6:30am asking if we could "go start Halloween now?"  There were tantrums from the minute my feet hit the floor.  We had cupcakes after breakfast and deviled eggs for a mid morning snack.  D wore his costume for a whole 5 min. the entire day.  Though I had dreamed of a smaller scale Christmas morning type of experience, Leah and Dylan had already been out in the kitchen before I even got out of bed and didn't discover their buckets of goodies until about half way through the day.  But even thought things didn't go exactly how I planned we still had an awesome Halloween that I'm sure we'll all remember for many years to come!  I also learned a valuable lesson in just going with the flow and not getting so mired down with how things don't go as planned. 

Here are some pictures I took of Grant for his 1st Halloween!!!

We hope everyone had a wonderful, fun filled Halloween!!!