Family Costume - and a Power Ranger

I say it year after year – campground trick-or-treating is far superior to actual trick-or-treating. There is no doorbell-ringing requirement, none of the awkward “are they home? Is someone going to answer the door?,” and less distance between bowls of candy. Vannestes look forward to this night all fall!

In September, we started the very important “what do you want to be for Halloween?” discussions. We’ve learned (the hard way) that early preparation is critical. The girls are currently in the heart of their obsession with Descendants (the third movie came out in August) – so they quickly decided to be Mal and Evie.

Then there were a couple of loooong days where Q decided she wanted to be Mal too and Fiona was.not.having.it. They worked it out and Q happily (?) returned to being Evie. Next step, they decided Mike should be Hades (Mal’s dad) and I should be Maleficent (Mal’s mom). I let that ride for a couple days to ensure Q didn’t get mad about Evie being parentless. She did not so we went with it.

Next up, should little brother be Carlos or Jay? What the ladies did not take into account is that little bro does not believe in group think and had decided he wanted to be a red Power Ranger. Despite their best marketing efforts (mom was proud), Dec stood strong – so red Power Ranger it was (let’s all pray this ability to ignore peer pressure remains rock solid in the teen years!). My Amazon cart was full of colored wigs – and a power ranger suit.

My shopping was mostly successful – except for Mike’s blue mohawk. It looked way more “flock of seagulls” than “Disney god of the underworld.” I put in one night of effort and a lot of hair gel to make it moderately better. Thankfully, Gma N has far more talent and patience than me and spent two days (when they were down watching the kids) making that wig a thing of beauty. Fiona is crazy in love with her purple wig and pretty much wants purple hair now.

The camping crew decided to skip the parade and getting ready was more relaxed. Mike even let me put some heavy eye-liner on him and he killed the look. It was so fun and the kids LOVED it! Real truth: the adults did too.

Trick-or-treating was less frigid than last year, which everyone appreciated. We went through 2.5 loops, found the site that hands out the shots, and called it when the kids all happily agreed with being done. Then it was back to the sites to hand out candy to the final trick-or-treaters and to participate in a pretty awesome dance party. We headed up to the program and our group took home a couple door prizes.

The only bummer of the weekend – they changed how sites are booked for the next year and when we went to get our sites for 2020, all the electric sites were already gone. After a group discussion, we committed to non-electric sites. And have a year to figure out how to not freeze to death!