I have decided that today is my favorite of the made-up food holidays: Candy Corn Day! I don’t think I’ve had any yet this year, but I’m going to have to make a point to pick some up. I might wait until Thursday, though, when it’ll all be half off, and I can get a big bag for like 50c.

Halloween was never an exceptionally big deal in my family – my parents are very religious, so while we went trick-or-treating when we lived in a neighborhood with kids, the scary aspect of it was never emphasized for us. We wore nice costumes made by Mom – one year I was a cheerleader, another year my brother was a shark. My small brother didn’t trick-or-treat until a couple of years ago, but one of my VERY favorite stories about him has to do with Halloween and his lack of understanding of it.

When Coo was four, his preschool had a “Noah’s Ark party” around Halloween so that the kids could dress up but without the secular, scary context. Coo was really into grammar at this point – he and Mom read all the time, and he was interested in EVERYTHING on the page, not just the words and pictures – so when asked what he wanted to be for the Noah’s Ark party, he said “a semicolon”. We had to explain to him that there were no semicolons on Noah’s Ark, so instead he was a polar bear – the cutest, grumpiest little polar bear ever.