Halloween Thirsty

Halloween used to be all about the candy to me.   When I was young. it was about acquiring the candy.   As I became an adult it turned into giving the candy.   Now that I have children, they're the ones interested in the candy.   Today, to me, Halloween is all about passing out adult drinks.

We're in a relatively new neighborhood and our community holiday traditions are only a year or two old.   Last year was the first year we had enough families to trick-or-treat in the neighborhood as before that the handful of houses and lack of children made other neighborhoods more appealing.  Last year I decided (with some fellow neighbors) that offering alcoholic drinks to the parents would be a way to enhance the evening for adults as they walked around with their children.   

We're not the first to think of this idea, but we latched on to it with a vengeance.   There wasn't a large percentage of families that handed out adult drinks last year, but those that did had a lot of fun with it.   My neighbor made a blood red drink and served it in blood bags and I had urine specimen bottles filled with something yellow and sweet. 

On September 1st this year my neighbor, Mary, and I talked about what we were planning on doing this year.   We had two months and we needed to start planning.   I wanted to come up with something that would be as big a hit as last year's urine cups.   I'll spare you the ideas and iterations I went through over those two months and get to what I ended up doing. 

I went with a medical/research theme not unlike last year.   I wore borrowed scrubs from my neighbor for my outfit.   We lit the front porch in large, black lights that pointed inwards towards the door.   On a table on the porch were Erlenmeyer flasks, beakers and test tubes filled with substances that glowed in \ black light.   My husband made signs showing "Danger Radiation", "Experiment" and the radiation symbol.    

My drink was served in a 50ML (1.5oz) specimen tube with a two-inch green glow stick floating inside.   Each tube had a green screw-off cap and words reading "Batch 42" (or some other batch number) written on it them ink only visible under UV light.   

I offered drinks to the parents and explained that the testing we'd done made us fairly confident the radioactive levels were mostly safe.  I suggested they didn't eat the radioactive slug (glow stick) as we didn't have the results back from the autopsies on those that did.   I had other patter that changed depending on if I knew the family or didn't.   I would hold up one or more of the vials into the black light so the batch numbers were visible and tut tut about that being a bad batch and that I wouldn't recommend giving that one to their husband unless he really deserved it.    

There was lots to say and it was all fun.  Parents who didn't come to the porch would find me walking out to see if they would be willing to participate in our study and how did they feel about drinking untested, radioactive substances?    I was almost never turned down and everyone had a fun asking me about it.

I had two friends helping me out on the porch: Jen and Darren.   They brought their eleven-year-old daughter and her friend to trick-or-treat with my children, chaperoned by my husband and Uncle Jonathan.    Without them I would have been in trouble.   Darren handed out the candy and Jen snapped and inserted the glow sticks into the drinks and helped me hand them out.    

The drink itself was the most boring part of it all.   I tried so many things.  I wanted the drink to glow, but the options I had for consumable, glowing substances didn't make tasty drinks.   I wanted the drink to taste good, but anything with any color in the liquor and cordial department dampened the glow stick's glow dramatically.    After a lot of testing I ended up going the straight-forward route: white wine.   People thought it was great.   Lots of people didn't know what it was when they drank it at first; white wine out of context of a wine glass must be more difficult to place—especially when it's a sweet wine like the Moscato I was serving. 

I have to also thank my husband for his help in the endeavor.   It wouldn't have been as fun or as impactful without his ideas and contributions.   You can see all the hand-painted signs he made for me in the picture below.    He helped me with ideas and so much of the preparations but ultimately he didn't get to see any of it in action because he was out with the children going house-to-house.

It was a grand night.  I'm looking forward to next year already.

My son at the front door looking up at the glowing spider webs.

Tray of radioactive samples with their glow sticks, Batch 37 ready for the next victim, er, parent.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was, "Chase" the Transformer police car from the show, Transformers: Rescue Bots for Halloween this year.   He almost changed his mind to be Ironman at the last minute but I think he was happy with his choice.   

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was a Wincess for Halloween.   She was a green and purple witch that was also a princess she and my son decided a few weeks ago.   Princess+Witch = Wincess. She loved her outfit and was happy wearing it all night, including the had (which would not stay on).

Fitness Update:  Halloween at the gym.   I wonder if Don was harder on us because he suspected we'd all be eating candy later tonight?