Trunk or Treat

Our church has a Halloween tradition called Trunk or Treat, held the Sunday before Halloween. It starts off with an organ concert in our sanctuary, with lots of hauntingly wonderful songs (Monster Mash, the theme from The Ghost and Mr. Chicken — one of my all-time favorite Halloween movies; get past the beginning of the YouTube video where the guy is just testing out the keys — , and Toccata & Fugue in d minor by Bach, stuff like that). Then after the concert, all the kids and parents head to the parking lot where there are games and projects to enjoy.

The part of the festivities that The Gahan Girls live for is the actual Trunk or Treat portion of the afternoon. Congregation volunteers line up their cars into two long rows, trunks facing inward, with a corridor between wide enough for people to walk through. The trunks are all decorated, and costumed kids go from trunk to trunk getting candy. We have one first place every year that we've done it, beginning in 2004 with our talking mirror, 2005 with the Candyland game board, 2006 with the ventriliquist and his dummy, (in 2007 Harleigh was sick so we couldn't do it at the last minute), and then this year's event will be held this coming Sunday. The last picture is a sneak peek at what we'll be doing. I painted the sign, which will be in front of our spooktacular trunk. (I used a plain white sheet of foamcore and stained it with coffee grinds to give it an old look, then used acrylic paint to create the design.) Our "booth" involves a large round glass fishbowl that my head fits inside of. The last little tidbit of preparation involves figuring out how I'm going to breathe. Just a small formality.