ALL HALLOWS DAY

Each year, at my place, my godkids and I made a gingerbread haunted house, using kits I bought at Cost Plus or Party City. We’d decorate it with candy corn, gummy worms, marshmallow ghosts and pumpkins, Skittles, jellybeans, and more. One year I discovered when I opened the box that the pieces of gingerbread were all broken up, so—after I went back and bought another kit—we used the broken shards to create a toothsome graveyard. Of course, the kids always wanted to take their creations home afterwards—and somehow or other Char, their black lab, always managed to savage them. (By the way, Cost Plus carries Halloween packets of “Beanboozled“ Jelly Bellies in flavors like Barf, Rotten Eggs, Stinky Socks, Boogers, etc. I tried only one of these and had to spit it out.)

One year Ella and I took pictures of each other making ghoulish faces. I scanned the photos, enlarged them to life-size in Photoshop, and printed them out on heavy glossy photo paper to make masks. Then we greeted the kids at the door on Halloween wearing each other’s faces. Of course, they were eager to join in the fun. And though it might seem incongruous to some, Arielle decided she wanted to wear the tiara she’d picked out at the Lacis museum—a birthday gift from me—with her Native American princess costume.

Above is the scrapbook page Arielle and I made that year. We used bat stickers to attach the photos to their mats, but, on the gingerbread house photo, I attached the bat wings with small brads, so you can lift the picture and see the surprise underneath—a pumpkin I carved with Michael.