Fireman and Dalmation

Landry really likes fire trucks and enjoys pretending to be a fireman fighting ferocious fires, so I thought it would be so cute to dress him up as a fireman for Halloween.  And it is only natural that his little brother should be a Dalmation, right?  The only problem is that Halloween in Texas is so dang unpredictable that there’s no way to know if you should dress your kids in a tank top & shorts or a fleece sweat suit on October 31st.  We’ve had Octobers that were 40 degrees and windy (considered very cold here in this part of Texas), as well as Octobers that were 95 degrees and sunny.  Well, unfortunately I picked the 40 degree costumes for my boys this year, and well…sure enough, it was 90 degrees the week of Halloween.

So needless to say, my adorable boys wore their adorable costumes for about 10 minutes.  And Micah did not enjoy one bit of the 10 minutes he wore his costume.  It’s just a good thing that I was able to find some great bargains and only spent a grand total of $8 on both costumes.  (I seem have this knack for finding great deals on things or being able to use things we already have to save lots of money.)

However, the good thing is they actually had 3 opportunities to wear them, so even though they didn’t wear them for very long, I still feel like we got our money’s worth out of it.  They dressed up to go to the Fall Festival at our church the Saturday before Halloween & then again to school on Thursday.  On Friday Landry found a Spiderman costume in our costume box that just happened to fit him perfectly, so I let him wear that for Friday night since it was not quite as hot as the fireman costume would be.  And once it cooled down to 70 degrees on Friday evening Micah wore his Dalmation costume for about 5 minutes.

Halloweenies & Boogers

I’ve never been a huge fan of Halloween although I do enjoy dressing up in costumes…and eating candy, especially chocolate. Anyway, once we started having children I was trying to decide how we would approach Halloween & how involved I wanted our kids to be in the “holiday.” Then last year I read an article in our church’s monthly newsletter about a family in our church who uses Halloween as an outreach to their neighbors. I mean what other time of the year does practically the entire neighborhood descend upon your home begging for candy? What a potential opportunity to share with them the love of Christ!

So we decided to try the same thing in our neighborhood. We did it last year & then again this year. And to help us pull it off we recruited the college kids in our Life Group. We had such a great time serving 120 hot dogs & hamburgers, hot chocolate, cider & of course, lots of candy to all the trick-or-treaters & their parents. And we now have the reputation for being the “Best House in the neighborhood,” as several of the teen-aged trick-or-treaters called us.

The boys enjoyed sharing the candy & food with others, as well as watching all the people coming and going in their costumes.  We didn’t have as many conversations about the Gospel as we would have liked…serving that many people is hard work (although definitely fun), but hopefully it will open up more opportunities in the future.  And hopefully some of the kiddos will learn the gospel through the tracts we gave out with the candy.  So we now have a Halloween tradition that will hopefully contribute to the Kingdom of God.