When I was a kid I always hoped for reasonably warm, dry weather for "Fright Night."  Living in Chicago, however, chances of that happening on the last day of October were slim.  More often than not, Halloween night would be cold and/or rainy and our costumes would be hidden under layers of coats/raincoats.  Still....we still found ways to have fun.  

     Since I've grown up, had kids and now grandkids, I still have the same hope of mild weather.  It's always more fun for the kids when they can enjoy the evening and show off their costumes without freezing to death or being all bundled up in coats.  Luckily, here in Virginia, the odds are much better and we've had several beautiful Halloween days/evenings in a row.  2009 was sort of a bust weather-wise.  It was cool and rainy but 2010, while a little on the cool side, was at least dry and reasonably pleasant.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed for Halloween Night 2011! 

     Our first Halloween away from Chicago was in Denver Colorado in 1979 where I was stationed for a school after being commissioned.  We were living in a very nice apartment complex in Aurora just outside Denver and there was an abundance of younger couples with kids.  Carrie was still a baby then but Brandy and Denise were both old enough to enjoy Trick-or-Treating around the complex.  Late October weather in Denver was pleasant and I remember it as rather warm during the day and cool but still comfortable in the early evening when the kids Trick-or-Treated.  It did get rather chilly later at night but by then the kids were done with the evening's festivities.  We had a lot of ghost and goblin visitors that evening and I was kept busy answering the door while Hil took the kids out to get their share of the candy.

     When we lived in Biloxi, about the only thing that would spoil Halloween was a downpour or a hurricane and late October evenings in Southern Mississippi were normally still shirt-sleeve weather.  If anything, it was sometimes a bit on the warm side for some of the costumes. 

     While we were there we threw a couple Halloween costume parties at our house.  They were popular with the flyers at the 7^th ACCS where I was assigned and with the nurses at Gulf Coast Community Hospital where Hil worked.  One year, one of my squadron-mates came as the Cookie Monster.  His costume totally encased him in long, thick synthetic blue fur and a huge Cookie Monster headpiece.  By the end of the evening he was drenched with sweat and was about dying in that thing but he was a good sport and kept it on all evening. 

     Hawaii was pretty much always beautiful weather for Halloween (and most any other time as well).  Halloween wasn't quite as big a thing with the locals but there were a lot of military families living in Mililani where we owned a house and we always had a decent turn-out for Trick-or-Treat.  We had a couple Halloween parties at our house there as well, continuing the tradition of inviting the people who worked with me at Pacific Command and the nurses that worked with Hil at Queen Emma Hospital in Honolulu.  We had a 16x35' in-ground pool in the back yard with a diving board (it took up almost half of our Hawaii-sized back yard).  Everyone brought bathing suits and when the costumes just got too warm, a quick dip in the pool was just the ticket to cool off. 

     Our first Halloween there (1984) was also our first party in our new (to us) house; the first of many parties in that house during almost 4 years that we lived on the Island.  On Halloween afternoon, as Hil was making veggies and other "finger food" for the party, one of our daughters ran to me to tell me green water was coming up into their bathtub. 

     When I want and looked...sure enough, green water.  This was our first home with a garbage disposal and I guess we hadn't gotten the "hang of it" yet.  It seems Hil was putting the veggie pealing in the disposal so quickly that they clogged the pipes.  I had to find the outside drain plug (not that easy since we'd only been in the house a short while and I had to hunt all over to find it) and feed the garden hose into it to blast the clog out. 

     If that weren't enough, about half an hour after the party started, the entire neighborhood lost power.  It was off for almost three hours and we had to resort to several large candles for inside lighting.  We found out later that, rather than the work of some magical power-robbing orb or the power company playing a Halloween trick, it was just a Gecko that had gotten into the circuits at the main power sub-station, shorting it out.  It did make for an interesting Halloween.

     When we moved to South Carolina, we found the weather there not much different than that in Mississippi.  We had a nice house right across from a lake and did just a little decorating for the event (we'd get into REAL decorating a couple years later).  Our kids were old enough by then that they didn't Trick-or-Treat any more but there were still a lot of smaller kids in the neighborhood so we always had lots of little ghost and goblin visitors to pass treats out to.