slideshow

The final week has approached. Only six more days to decide, and then it will be too late.

Yes, Halloween — the day when everyone gets a chance to be someone else for a day — will be here in one week.

Do you know what you are going to be? Have your kids and grandkids got their costumes for the big day of trick-or-treating?

Halloween has been my favorite holiday — despite getting presents at Christmas time — since I was just a youngster. I’ve been everything from Bugs Bunny — those who are my age remember the plastic costumes with the plastic face masks that were held on by an elastic thread — to a mad scientist to a gypsy and Jeannie.

Even in college I took the time to dress up, because it was no fun to go to the Halloween dance/party as yourself. I was a good witch one year, and several of us did the Charlie’s Angels thing another year.

My mother made my costumes for me when I was just a toddler. I went with a sweat jacket and cardboard painted wings as a butterfly one year.

As an adult, I’ve had the privilege of being a spider woman complete with a black shirt and black pants and kitten heels featuring a sharp point at the toe, a spider web tiara, glow-in-the-dark spider web elbow gloves with a plastic spider on the ring finger and spider web earrings and necklace.

Last year, for my son’s first Halloween (he just missed being born on Halloween by two days), I was able to share with Little Man and my husband our first family Halloween. The two “men” dressed up in striped overalls with red Henley shirts and striped denim hats as train engineers, while I wore a fancy mask and sprayed my hair in colors.

We took a quick break from trick-or-treating downtown so I could take the men to the red caboose at the corner of South and Franklin streets and get some pictures of them. They came out awesome, and looked like a professional photographer did them. I was so proud of them, and myself, because I have been working on my photography skills for years.

This year, Little Man will be dressing up like Oakley — our resident raccoon, who almost nightly visits the front porch to partake in the cat food. I haven’t decided where I’ll be taking his pictures yet, probably on a cute tree stump among the leaves and the woods, but we’ll see when that gets here.

I can’t wait to see all the different costumes of critters, ghosts, goblins, princesses and other creatures when the kids and adults come out to trick-or-treat next week.

So everybody be deciding, and come up with some good costumes. The more creative the better.

Wendy Byerly Wood is the associate editor of The Mount Airy News. She can be reached at wbyerly-wood@heartlandpublications.com or at 719-1923.