Yay Friday! Today’s blanks have a fall theme, & it’s perfect for the type of day it is because it looks like Halloween outside. I love the days leading up to Halloween! Blue skies peeking out from behind rolling gray clouds, leaves blowing around, and that crisp chill in the air. I live for days like this.
1. Nothing says fall like curling up with blankets, pumpkin spice candles, & scary movies. Sounds like what I have planned tonight.
2. My favorite autumnal tradition is the vineyards & pumpkin picking with Frank. We’ve done this since we met & I seriously love it so much. We skipped the vineyards this year because we have so many expenses coming up ($$$$) but he still took me for pumpkins, cider donuts, jelly apples, & mums :)
Growing up my favorite tradition was hands down watching The Worst Witch with my mom & sister. We watched it every year right before Halloween & we still do it some years.
3. My favorite fall treat is cider donuts!
4. Fall makes me think of a new beginning because it feels more like the start of a new year than New Year’s does. There’s a magic in the air wen fall comes around & it brings lots of good changes.
5. Autumn free-form word association, go! Crunchy leaves, naps, farms, little kids, apples, my mom, candles, witches, soup!
6. My favorite fall holiday is (Halloween or Thanksgiving) Halloween! Listen, no one does Halloween like my momma & growing up in her home meant Halloween was serious business. When I was a kid I remember rushing home from school on Halloween & she’d have all sorts of goodies out for us & scary music playing, and spiderwebs all over the house. Sometimes Michael Jackson’s Thriller would be on & she’d dance all over the house with us. She prepared for WEEKS. We would eat treats, watch The Worst Witch, and then go to my elementary school for their Halloween party, which she eventually wound up taking over. Then she would have tons & tons of kids & their parents at our house to start trick-or-treating.
There were years where she threw the biggest Halloween parties I can remember, and they always had a DJ, or a karaoke set, or just tons of music & dancing. She strung donuts on strings across our porch & covered the kids in powdered sugar as we tried to get the donuts while she pulled string away from us. There was bobbing for apples, and lots of sticking our blindfolded hands into “eyes & guts.”
She sewed our costumes by hand until we were old enough to say we wanted the packaged ones like every other kid. Even then we still had the best hair & makeup because mom made sure of it. She even went as far as closing down our block, renting horses & a trailer & creating a haunted hayride for all the kids in the neighborhood.
Now, as adults, we do Halloween for my mom. We must see her that day & there are only two days I can remember missing Halloween with her: One I was away at Frank’s Homecoming, and last year I was miserably sick. I laid on my couch & called her to talk Halloween instead. It’s “our day.” I may not wear the fairy princess costumes she used to sew me by hand, but I wake up the morning of Halloween & think of my mom immediately. The air is filled with her on that day & I’ll never forget how much fun being a kid was around that holiday (even though I tended to fall down in my costumes & cry - I was always a klutz). Love you, momma!
If you need some awesome Halloween plans, come over. My parents’ block still closes down to this day & bands play, kids run around, a DJ makes everyone dance, and all the houses are set up for haunted walk throughs. I told you Halloween was serious business.
{fill in your own blanks here} xO
