We were pretty well organized for setting up, having done most of the prep work before Halloween. We had to wipe down the table and chairs as they had been stored outside. My daughter had to take all the DVDs off the shelves we were going to use. Since she had alphabetized them in the first place, she wanted to take them off systematically so they could be put back on in the same order.
I spent some time with lighter fluid and paper towels trying to get the blue paint from a previous science fair project off the plastic table cloth. It helped but did not remove all the paint.
To our delight and surprise the office/housing across the road from us had stuck up a few Halloween decorations. To give you a little background, we have a slightly strained relationship with the complex. The ground floor is a office with maybe 20 employees. The company president or owner has an apartment with a garden that fronts onto our street; the company entrance is on the other side of the building and the top 2 floors are employee housing. If we are playing outside, the owner, who we call Miracle Max due to his resemblance to the character from the Princess Bride, peers out of his window and frowns when we are being too loud and rambunctious. If that were the end of it, we could ignore him but sadly, our tennis balls, volley balls, frisbees, and airplanes are drawn to his tree and garden. The fence is too high to scale so at least once a week we have to go around to the office and beg for them back. When their gardeners come, they kindly return everything to us but they don't come too often. Even the employees aren't too keen to ask the President for access to the garden to get whatever we have lost.
After getting a precious volleyball back on Thursday, my daughter and I thought we might improve relations be taking the office staff some cookies on Friday. We bought Tim Tams and put them in a pumpkin and took them into the office to say thank you for the volley ball. Afternoon tea and cookies is a tradition in Japanese companies, and is still very common in small companies here.
With the decorations appearing on Halloween, we were very hopeful. Throughout the day, the ghosts, bats and pumpkin signs they had put up kept falling down. Not wanting to be un-neighbourly (and we already had the tape out) we restuck them up several times using an assortment of tapes. We finally gave up late in the day. I wonder what they will think when they take them down and find all the different kinds of tape on the back?
We were in and out of the house all day getting things ready. There was a lot more foot traffic on our street, coming to admire the bats, Margaret and the spider webs.
We started setting up in earnest around 3pm. First we brought out the table and chairs, quickly followed by the six book shelves. The girl child centered the shelves and table on the driveway. She artfully placed the shelves in a semi circle.
We brought out the signs and used double sided tape to secure them to the top of the book shelves, draped black fabric through the signs and strung eyeball lights across the top.
Each shelf on the top two rows had bottles, stuffed animals and all the other Halloween stuff placed on them. I put fabric leaves on a few shelves. I put the rest of the fabric in the lower shelves. My daughter anchored all the bookshelves in place by putting kettlebells in each bottom shelf.
Besides a tablecloth, the table out front had 2 cauldrons; one with candy, one with the plastic bat rings. Also, my neighbor had cool rechargable battery-operated tea lights.
We were all set by 4pm and, even though there were no trick or treaters, the foot traffic and photo taking steadily increased.
By 5:30, we were all set. We had added glow sticks and mini lights behind the jars to make them even more eerie. We had our first batch of the 900 lollipops in our cauldron and a second cauldron with over 800 bat rings.
The girl child was in her purple ad black witch costume. The boy was dressed as a mad scientist and off to a friends house to start his first wave of trick or treating. I had changed into all black and pinned a tiny witches hat into my hair. My neighbor was wearing a large witches hat with pink and black cat ears and a tail.
We thought we were all set!