Every year my kids look forward to Halloween.  They start thinking about their costumes in the middle of summer.  Of course, they never decide on anything until October 30th or even 31st some years.  Then we are stuck with throngs of other last minute costume shoppers picking through the left overs at Party City or one of those Halloween stores that come and go like the circus.

  What I don't do at the last minute, but should, is buy candy.  As soon as the stores start stocking the shelves with those great big variety packs I can't resist.  This seems to start happening earlier every year.  You know how Christmas decorations are for sale before Halloween?  Well, I imagine that at some point the Halloween stuff will appear right around the 4th of July. No matter how far off Halloween is, I can't help myself from buying bags of candy. I convince myself that this will be the year that I will actually save the candy all the way to Halloween.  So far that year hasn't come.

  Well back to the kiddos.  They love Halloween and they love dressing up and trick-or-treating with their friends.  I don't recall being nearly as excited about this holiday when I was a kid, but this might have something to do with the fact that I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA and by the time Halloween rolled around it was generally freezing.  It really didn't matter what costume I had on because my mother made me wear a giant parka, a hat, mittens, and boots over top of it.  Kinda ruins the effect.

  So I have always been excited to see what my kids want to dress up as, and through the years they've come up with some pretty cute costumes.  I'm not a seamstress so they are almost exclusively store bought, another thing I never had growing up.  My mom wasn't a seamstress either, but it didn't really matter because of the aforementioned parka, hat, mittens, and boots.

  This year my oldest is home working on her college applications.  If she makes it out of the house at all it will be dressed as "a stressed out high school senior."  It may be the first Halloween in her life that she didn't go trick-or-treating.

  My middle son is almost 15 and he does not remotely feel weird going out with his buddies dressed in costumes, knocking on doors and begging for candy along side all the little kids and their parents who are no doubt wondering what kind of mother lets her kids still go trick-or-treating when they are teenagers.  Well, since he is dressed in a skelleton costume, complete with a mask that hides his face entirely I guess they'll have to keep on wondering.  Works just fine for me.

  My youngest son is 12, so he really isn't too old to trick-or-treat by anyone's standards.  But he apparently is to old to want to be the first person to arrive at a party.  He made his dad sit in a parked car until the clock in the car read one minute past the official start time as stated on the invitation. It's OK to be late, but only losers show up early. Teenagehood has arrived, even if he's not 13 yet.

  So, how old is too old to dress up and trick-or-treat?  I am not sure.  I am, as I like to say, "older than Jennifer Aniston, and younger than Angelina Jolie" and this will be my first year not going out since the kids were born.  With two at their friends' and one focused on silly stuff like getting into college, I might have just figured out the answer.  Or, I might just pop into the garage and break into the costume box.  It's early yet, and there's candy to be had.