Halloween at the Woodier household was almost a non-event this year.  We closed on a new (to us) house the beginning of the second week of October and since it was only about 10 miles from our old house, we decided to move most of our stuff ourselves.  It took almost a week to get everything unloaded from the truck and the "PODs" and I was exhausted from hauling box after box of "stuff" and was definitely NOT in the Halloween spirit.  Adding to that, the fact that most of my Halloween decorations were packed in the back of a rented storage locker with a bunch of furniture, boxes, etc, etc. in front of them 

I wasn't even planning on putting anything out except for a couple pumpkins until Hilary chided me into digging some of the decorations out of the storage shed and setting them up.  As it was, it was the bare minimum this year (though I did add a couple more items the day before Halloween) but I was just too worn out to come us with anything particularly imaginative. 

The good part was that our new neighborhood has a lot more smaller kids and we had considerable volume of trick-or-treaters during the appointed hours.  As was the case in our old neighborhood, the littler ones were accompanied by their parents and it gave Hil and I a chance to chat with them and introduce ourselves.

I got three pumpkins again this year during a quick outing to Cox Farm.  This one was the biggest of the three.  It was in their "prize winners" section and was well over two feet tall.  My carving wasn't very imaginative this year and, while it came out OK, I'd done a similar one the past couple years.  This shot was taken on Halloween afternoon, just after I finished carving it.  

This one is the medium sized one.  It stood about 16 inches tall but was rather thin.  I stuck a pair of store-bought plastic eyes in the eye sockets just for the heck of it.  In the end, I really wasn't all that satisfied with it.  This one was also taken in the afternoon.

This is the smallest one and is more rounded.  I did a puking pumpkin a couple years ago and decided to do one again this year.  It turned out to be a big hit with both the kids and their parents and it will probably become an annual feature at the Woodier house. 

This is the same graveyard as seen in earlier years, just relocated to our new front yard.  There is a small patch of grass between the sidewalk and the flowerbed and it turned out to be an ideal spot for it.

Here's the witch mannequin crashing into a tree.  Unfortunately, the new house doesn't have a big tree to wrap it around like the old house. 

Again this year, Halloween was a beautiful, cloudless day.  I took this picture about 4:30 in the afternoon and the temperature was in the low 70s.

This is the same "ghostly apparition" that I used last year.  This time I set it up in one of the small trees next to the sidewalk so it would sense the movement of the kids as they approached the house.  When the motion sensor detects movement, three blue/purple lights come on shining down on the skull and hands,  Then the hands and head begin going up and down while a small speaker emits groans and howls.

I didn't build a shack for the witches this year or set out the bubbling caldron.  I just propped them up behind the tombstones.

This is what the front of the house looked like as it began to get dark.  I did set up one strip of orange rope lights along one side of the sidewalk and draped a net of purple lights over one of the small evergreens on the side of the front door.

Tradition dictated I had to set out the fog generator and here it is in action.

Above is the big pumpkin lit up as it began to get dark and below is the puking pumpkin.

Here's a shot Hil took of Sebastian and I sitting next to the biggest pumpkin.
 

Cameron and Sydney dressed in their costumes.
 

Finally, a shot of the grandchildren sitting next to the biggest pumpkin.  They were getting tired by this time and you can tell by their faces.