Special Hallowe'en Edition

 Summary: Sam had the most fun he can legally have at this age, and Josh was accepting of being dressed up like a jack-o-lantern and hauled around the neighborhood.

Nice weather. Brisk but dry, with a hazy moon.

Sam was in heaven, running from door to door talking loudly and non-stop about pretty much everything he was seeing and receiving.

The neighborhood houses put on a decent show. One house clearly had a bachelor, as he was handing out FULL SIZE candy bars.

Boy, peanut-butter cups are popular! They will all get migrated to the lab, where they can't hurt anybody, just make us fat. Susan had a primo stash on hand to swap for Sam's peanutty haul. We barely bothered with dinner, and in fact Susan and I ate at 9:30 once everyone was down.

I understand in a neighborhood near Ruth's they had hundreds of kids come through. (Ruth, is this right?) Wow! Katie posted to fb with the dire message "Out of candy in 10 minutes!", which reads like a wartime post from the the front: "Out of bullets in ten minutes." Hopefully she wasn't overrun by Fuzzy Wuzzies. (ah yes!)

On the way in this morning I wished Sam a happy All Saints Day. Being in a Reformed church, that holiday's been squashed by Reformation Day. Really a shame, if only for the hymns which are lost. "For All the Saints" is amazing. (Why couldn't they have chosen one of the nameless Sundays in Pentecost? Or, as they call it, "ordinary time.")

Anyway, told him that the day after Hallowe'en is All Saints Day, when we remember all the Christians who have gone before.

Also had to warn him that no one at school will have any idea what he's talking about if he mentions this--a common refrain these days, since we read about the Gerasene Demonaic on Saturday and I had to tell him all about demons. (He did tell me this morning that a girl in his class, Meliss, is both allergic to nuts and believes in God! I asked how he knew the latter and he said he simply asked her.)

But back to All Saints': As an example of a Christian we might remember fondly I used our predecessor Jonathan Brace Hammond, a Methodist circuit-riding preacher in upstate NY. Sam, who now judges ancestors by his connections to Gov'r Bradford and, through Uncle Paul, the Wright Bros., immediately asked if Hammond was famous. No, but still important.