My love/hate relationship with Halloween

Things I hate about Halloween:

1. Gross, bloody costumes
2. People jumping out at you from the dark when you go up to their house to trick-or-treat
3. Carving pumpkins. It always sounds like fun, but it's a big mess and the kids lose interest after 10 or 15 minutes.
4. Perfect mom types who send homemade popcorn balls and cutesy little perfectly iced jack-o-lantern cookies to school
5. Those same moms who whip up elaborately sewn costumes like it's no big deal
6. Haunted houses. If I wanted to lose my breath and wet my pants, I'd drink a Biggie Diet Coke and go for a run.
7. Kids way too big for trick-or-treating ringing my doorbell anyway
8. Stupid candy like Dots and Dum Dum suckers
9. All the television channels being dominated by scary movies

Things I love about Halloween:

1. Vanilla Tootsie Rolls -- best when twisted together with the chocolate
2. Preschool Halloween songs -- "5 little pumpkins sitting on a gate..."
3. Friendly ghost and smiley witch decorations
4. Other people's fabulously carved jack-o-lanterns
5. Candy corn and peanuts or mallowcreme pumpkins all by themselves
6. The Today Show costume reveal
7. "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown"
8. Answering the door for trick-or-treaters (appropriately aged) 
9. Clever and creative costumes -- check out the great one below

This is a girl who goes to our church:

Can you guess what she is? 

Gum stuck to the bottom of a shoe! Isn't that great? Here's what her mom said about how they put it together:

We got the pink clothes from goodwill, and then hot glue gunned the shoe to a headband. Easy peasy. If you didn't want to buy costume giant shoes, you could blow up photos of shoes and paste them to foam core board and then hot glue those to a hat, hoodie, or headband.