Many years ago, we lived in an AWESOME neighborhood. The very definition of community. It was a unique situation in that we weren't just neighbors, we were all very close friends that did a TON of stuff together. Couples game nights, Sunday dinners, Girls trips, Guys golf and poker trips, Pool parties, New Years Eve parties, July 4th parties, Easter egg hunts. Whoever was in town, would all spend Thanksgiving together. And oh, Halloween. We would spend months getting all of the pieces for our costumes (the adults....not the kids) in preparation for the annual Halloween Party, two weekends before Halloween. Once that was over, the core group of us, would spend the rest of the month building and decorating a haunted house. This was no ordinary, backyard, amateur haunted house. Two huge tents filled with hallways and rooms. It would take the guys days to frame the whole thing and the girls (3 of us) a week to decorate and fill the rooms with scary scenes. Every year we would don our overalls (because they have umpteen pockets to hold supplies and are way comfy) grab our staple guns and pool our ideas from our hyper-actively creative minds to create some really cool effects. We had a BLAST decorating together. Have you ever tried to staple webbing to a ceiling while standing on a ladder and laughing your butt off? I can't even begin to describe to you how precious those memories are or why it became my favorite time of the year, but it did. I would look forward to it all year long. And then we had to move away.
The first Halloween we spent in Illinois, we actually flew back to Houston for the Halloween Party and my honey spent the whole next day building the walls of that year's haunted house. But we had to fly back home before any of the decorating was started. I was so sad. Not just "aww, I miss that" kind of sad. Miserably upset, kind of sad. I missed my friends and our old life horribly. I couldn't take part in the holiday in my usual form but I needed to do something, so I made our front yard into a graveyard. I cut out tombstones and painted them to look like cracking stone. I bought a small picket fence and made that look old and spooky. My honey found some dead trees and braced them up so I could add moss and webs to them for additional effect. It turned out pretty cool but it wasn't enough to appease my creative appetite.
The following year, either because he missed it too or he was tired of seeing me mope around, my amazingly wonderful husband said that he would build me a haunted house. Not anything on the grand scale of the one we did in Houston. A small one. But that was fine with me. Our kids were sooo excited. However much building the HH was embedded into my memories, it was even more so for them. They had grown up with it. It had become a HUGE part of their childhood.
The first year we did it all on our own was trying, to say the least. We had nothing. No lumber for the walls or a tent to go over it. Not one blacklight. The only decorations I had were the ones that I had contributed to the one in Houston, that for some reason didn't get stored with the rest of the boxes the previous year. We were starting from scratch so yes...that year we spent a small fortune just to get it up and running. My honey built the entire thing himself. My second youngest son helped where he could but the bulk of it fell to his Dad. (He did get some new tools out of the deal though. Very first purchase was a nail gun.) Then it was up to my daughter and I to decorate the whole thing. It wasn't the same as being down in Houston but that was okay. We didn't realize it at the time, but we were beginning to make a whole new set of memories for our favorite time of year. In the middle of the decorating phase, we had several nights of SEVERE storms. There were times when I didn't know if we would ever actually get it open but we made it through. No one in our new subdivision really knew what to think. They had never experienced a neighborhood HH. The first night we opened I was excited, nervous and proud. What if they don't like it? What if they think it's cheesy? What if no one comes?? Yeah...THAT was wasted energy. We were a very definite hit.
After several years and a move to yet another state (but this time back home near family) we are still doing the HH every year. Of course, like most things, it has grown and gotten bigger and better every year. In addition to opening and running it, we have also started a new tradition. Opening night is always the Saturday before Halloween. That night we invite all of our family and friends up to our house. Some of them are our actors that work in the HH. We make tons of food, hot apple cider and hot chocolate. While the fun is going on outside, there's a makeshift party going on inside as well. I love that night because I get to share all of our hard work with the people who mean the most to me. My kids have friends that work it and look forward to it every year now too. We have new friends (well, actually old friends from way before we ever even lived in Houston) that help us out with some of it now. We get to provide Halloween Memories to yet another neighborhood full of kids. But absolutely NONE of this could ever happen without one specific person. My amazing husband.
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No one could even begin to comprehend what all this man does, BY HIMSELF, to make this wish of mine come true every year. It's just one of the never ending number of reasons why I am so totally in love with him.
