One of the finest ever

Yesterday's Halloween was among the finest I've had in recent memory.

Unlike previous years, when I've bought industrial quantities of candy to feed the mobs of children and adolescents who invade our small city streets on Halloween, this year my mami, my husband and I dispensed a small, sane amount of candy to the handfuls of tiny tots who prowled the outskirts of my small college on the hill.

Because of its miniature scale, the experience was even more delightful. Our neighbor's little girl, dressed as a pumpkin, kept coming over to ogle and point at my large, orange, electrically illuminated pumpkin, which glowed in the window as darkness fell.

She also pointed to one of my candle-lit luminaria, which has the smiling face of a friendly white ghost. When her mother asked her what ghosts say, she puckered her lips to whisper the cutest "boo" I've ever heard.

Kids dressed in all kinds of costumes came by -- a Ninja, a Spiderman, a Dragon who refused to wear his dragon head and his friend, the Knight, and a Piglet who spoke Spanish and asked us to comment on her pretty, shiny bracelet.

"Estoy muy elegante," she said, as her mother -- who is a colleague in Spanish -- my mami and I did all we could to stop ourselves from laughing too loud at her self-assurance and her obviously eccentric sense of fashion given that she was dressed in a pink-and-white outfit with ears and a glowing green necklace.

Another set of kids came by and they were all dressed as various kinds of dead people. When I complimented one on his white-faced spookiness, his friend came up to me and said, with pride: "I'm a dead soccer player!"

When they had moved on, my husband wondered just which soccer player he had in mind...

After they'd visited the other apartments in the complex, one kid from that group came back toward us bellowing in a clear tone of indignation: "Don't go to that apartment, all they gave me was a banana! Can you believe it? A banana!"

"That's good for you," my mami, true to form, pointed out.

"You can use it with your breakfast tomorrow," I said, thinking that he could have it with cereal.

"I have eggs and bacon for breakfast!" he said, obviously clueless as to what he could possibly do with the banana.

After about an hour of dolling out candy and greeting colleagues and neighbors, the trick-or-treaters were gone and another Halloween was about to end. Not so soon, though, since I dragged my poor husband and a student up to the south side of the campus to hear the security staff tell ghost stories over a camp fire and hot chocolate and apple cider.

The stories were spooky, the night was windy and perfectly eerie, and we were all appropriately creeped out (well, at least I was and so was the student, as she told me today) when we made our way home late that night.

I didn't have a very restful sleep since I kept praying that no ghosts would show up to visit and then chastised myself for thinking that way (since there's no better way to summon a ghost than to wish it wasn't near you). But it made Halloween appropriately Halloweeny.

As Halloweens go, this one was one of the finest ever. That shouldn't be surprising, though. Another student told me today that this small college on the hill is supposedly one of the most haunted places in the U.S. No wonder...