Halloween in the Neighborhood

Halloween is our favorite holiday, as you can probably tell from our celebration schedule:

Thursday, October 25: Metropolis Glitterball

Friday, October 26: dinner with friends in Roppongi. Good news, I can sit on a bar stool without having to take the dragon off. Bad news, the people that came in and wanted to get a picture or ask about said dragon inevitably got my attention from my left, which was transformed for the evening into one giant blue blind spot.

Stupid hair won't keep a curl.

Saturday, October 27: office party (everyone put real effort into their costumes, but my camera is crap at taking pictures in low light, so I could only guarantee good pictures of the absolutely amazing food, which went unblinded and unmoving while I used the flash.)

The overview of "the vomit is gluten free, definitely try that, the cockroaches and bloody intestines are vegetarian, but the fingers and bloody rats are meat" (paraphrased) was a little unexpected, but then I saw the table.

Meathead.

From top left: Cockroaches (dates), mice (meatballs), bloody intestines (veggie filling in puff pastry), mummy cupcakes, severed fingers (vienna sausages with onion fingernails) in hummus.

Milano tombstones on rice krispie treat plots with coconut grass

Jack O'Lantern vomiting spinach pie into a cardboard toilet and a corpsified veggie platter.

Sunday, October 29: We woke up to rain with a forecast of rain all day, so we stayed in. Now we're kicking ourselves, because we had planned to go to the Halloween parade in Kawasaki, but we weren't excited about the idea of traveling an hour to get poked in the eye by ten thousand umbrellas* or have Husband's hair color melt all over to change his impression from "Colonel Sanders" to "piece of melting chalk". It turned out that the rain was so light that nobody had an umbrella, and the whole thing was just huge.

* Every single person in Japan carries an umbrella when it rains, but somehow you never see umbrellas until it actually starts. Japanese people must all be magical weather imps. I don't know how else they know. Also, ten thousand people is by no means an exaggeration. The parade alone is 3,500 people and all registration slots were filled within the first couple days it was available. Assuming more spectators than participants, that's a lot of people.


Wednesday, October 31: Our neighborhood had a kids' trick-or-treating event. It's not done door-to-door like it is in the US, moms brought their kids in costume to line up at tables for a couple hours in the early afternoon to get candy from a handful of tables set up by sponsor companies. We got dressed up again and went to the station to see the kids' costumes and pose for pictures.

This was probably the most adorable moment:

We weren't the only adults dressed up! Whether that's good or bad is a matter of opinion.

Yes, the guy in red is just wearing a swim cap and underwear. Yes, I cropped it there on purpose.

Left and Right are, in theory, children's TV characters Gachapin and Mukku. The guy in the center is Majin-buu from Dragonball Z. Hey, anything that makes Halloween a more successful dress-up-and-go-out holiday is moving forward, even if pants are in short supply.

I'm glad I could get a picture of my dragon next to a kid dressed as a dragon. I think the moms mostly wanted a picture of the kids and Kentucky Ojisan, but one of them was kind enough to take another picture with my camera as well.

We stuck around for half an hour or so. That night we had dinner at a friend's house and watched some holiday classics. Peanut curry vegetables on rice and the Nightmare Before Christmas are a good way to end a mid-week Halloween.

We didn't go to dinner in full costume, but I did wear a festive Hello Kitty hat.

It's pleasantly warm, so I think I'll wear it all winter, at least around the house. (It gets cold enough inside that when winter really settles in, the olive oil in the kitchen freezes solid and ice crystals form in the shampoo.)

I'm going to take off the tiny witch hat, though. It's a little silly.