Baby Boy in his tiger costume. This is from a professional shoot we did a few weeks before Halloween.

For as long as my husband and I have lived together, we have always gotten into the spirit of Halloween, and over the years we have built up some special traditions.

In our old house, we had a basement suite that we rented to tenants. The first year in that house, my husband came up with the idea to invite our tenants up to our place to hand out candy with us, since the trick or treaters weren’t likely to find the tenants’ “front” door, which was at the back of our house. This was also a nice excuse for us to socialize with our tenants without the risk of muddying the landlord tenant relationship.  And thus, a Halloween tradition was born!

We would order pizza, drink beer, and take turns handing candy out to the kids coming to our door. To keep things interesting, we would also take bets at the beginning of the night as to what the most popular costumes would be (keeping in mind any recent blockbuster movies or current events), and then track the number of kids we got, along with what costume each one wore.

Pumpkin carving was another tradition. Rather than sticking with the usual scary face, our pumpkin would typically be carved with a scary sign of the times.  Over the years, we have had a pumpkin carved with the initials of a proposed new tax, a symbol of a controversial government program, and (our favourite) – the “economic downturn” pumpkin of 2008.

A few years ago, we even started dressing our cat up in a pumpkin costume. While the costume suited his round proportions very well, he never seemed very happy in it! The costume was actually made for small dogs (and therefore didn’t fit him well in all the right places), and after seeing the resigned expression on his face when we subjected him to another year of dressing up, I understand why we were not able to find a costume made especially for cats.

Last summer we moved back to Toronto after an eight year absence, which meant we were once again living close to both our families. My mom and cousins had been getting together at my mom’s place the last few years, as the houses in her neighbourhood tended to go over the top with decorations, so now that we were back, we were invited to join them. While we no longer had tenants to invite upstairs, my husband and I were really looking forward to enjoying our first Halloween in our new house, so in the end we moved the party to our house hosting my mom and stepfather, as well as my cousin, his wife and two little kids. Everyone had a blast, and we were hiding a little secret that I was eight weeks pregnant. I remember saying to my husband at the time “Can you believe that next year we will get to dress embie up in a costume??”.

This year was mostly a repeat of last year (I think the new tradition is that everyone comes to our house for Halloween!), with the important difference that Baby Boy was on the scene now. I bought him a tiger costume, and my husband and I couldn’t resist taking him out to see a few of our neighbours. Even though Baby Boy is too little to enjoy candy, our neighbours insisted we fill up for ourselves (an unexpected bonus), and despite the dreary, rainy weather, we had so much fun showing off our little Tiger!  I can’t wait to share Halloween memories with our boy in the years to come.

Here are a few Halloween night pictures:

Baby Boy filling up before getting in costume.

Baby Boy in full tiger glory (I love the tail!)