When I outgrew Trick or Treating (and yes, as we all know, that took a while), my dad and I would decorate the house as terrifyingly as possible. He would bring home flasks and beakers, lab notebooks and charts, photos of dissections and anatomy textbooks. Outside we would hang mannequins from the basketball hoop, have zombies crawling out of their graves and howls of terror emanating from every nook and cranny. Not only would kids have to navigate the graveyard, corpses and other gruesome decorations outside, they would have to enter our front hall and make the long trek through our twisted and deranged lab to come away with any treats at all.
If they dared.
We knew we'd been successful when a) children either refused to come closer or b) ran away screaming. The icing on the cake was when later in the evening some older kids would exclaim "Cool! We found it!"
This would often have the added benefit of ensuring that a relatively small supply of superior candy would last through the evening.
So I'm loving it this year when the five year old is coming up with as many ways as possible to make our place as spooky as can be. Some of the ideas should disturb me, but I just love it too much.
Of course, a big effort deserves a big payoff, so keeping with the retro theme, this year KinderSurprise is offering a whole line of chocolate eggs filled with Transformer toys. Even better, each of the 8 different Transformers found in the Kinder Eggs can be connected like the constructicons to make one mammoth robot. Did I mention there are perks to being a KinderDad?
I love it when everything comes together.
Disclosure: I received compensation for my participation in the Kinder Dad program.