Costumes are put away.
Carved pumpkins, their jack-o faces having begun to shrivel in on themselves, have been tossed over the electric fence into the field.
Paper bats are no longer taped to the walls.
And there are no more orange lights glowing in our house.
The unseasonably warm October temperatures have given way to our first snowfall.
The clocks have turned back.
And it seems we are shifting from fall to winter.
And with that comes a mixed feeling of:
Loneliness. (Something about the cold? The early onset of night? Feels like a longing for things beyond this life and reminds me of the time as a child I found myself all alone in the quietest snow down the "no dump" hill north of our house. Everything was so still and when the distant sound of a train whistle finally blew across the quiet, I suddenly felt so alone and homesick I thought I might die.)
Anxiousness. (November reminds me that Christmas presents for ten kids aren't going to simply buy and wrap themselves.)
Coziness. Excitement. Anticipation. Joy. (Soon there will be Christmas lights, and Christmas music, and kids home from college, little kids so excited they can't sleep, stockings hanging and nativities placed, and the smell of evergreen in our house!)
Nostalgia. (Does any season encompass all that was brightest and happiest from childhood like Christmas?)
And ... a little (more than a little) disappointment. (This is not a "shifting to winter" feeling in general, rather something specific to this year as the window for weather warm enough to lay the foundation for our home--which we'd been working so hard and with such hopefulness to make happen this fall--is swiftly closing.)
But, before we fall headlong into winter and its accompanying holidays, I ought to at least put our Halloween pictures up!
We still haven't fully established what our Halloween tradition is here, but had stew as we often do, then tried out the College/Young Ward trunk-or-treat (which seems to be where one sees all their neighbors in neighborhoods where going door-to-door isn't feasible). We then went to one of the Mendon neighborhoods to give our kids a little traditional trick-or-treating.
Also, the week earlier, Mette and Summer hosted a Halloween party. They'd wanted to do a combined birthday party in early August, but somehow I never made that happen. To make up for it I let them have this little party.
Between Summer, Mette, Hans, Starling and all the friends that couldn't possibly be left off the invitations list, we had 16 little kids crowded into our rental. It was a bit wild. But they all had a great time making mason-jar mummies and Halloween graham-cracker houses, watching Room on the Broom, and dancing to Halloween music.
