Today’s Top Ten Tuesday is a Halloween-themed freebie, so I’m going the non-bookish route and looking back over my favorite Halloween(ish) memories through the years!

1. I enjoyed Halloween as a kid, but it was really college when the holiday got super fun. My friends and I dressed up and went out trick-o-treating in a rich neighborhood despite being 18/19 years old. We also took pictures in front of an old steeple that was just sitting on the side of the road. Really.

2. Pumpkin patches and corn mazes with toddlers who were afraid to pet the goats. 😀 To be fair, Morrigan wasn’t the least bit afraid. Just Ambrose. (Laurence was in utero when this picture was taken.)

3. My favorite Halloween decoration ever was this circle of ghosts we made outside our house in 2004.

4. Making a Halloween-themed gingerbread house has been a tradition for us ever since Jason and I met back in 1999. We can’t do one every year, but we build them when we can. We’ve made a courthouse hanging, a witch-burning, the headless horseman, a scene from Sweeney Todd, and Twilight (complete with a stalker werewolf). My favorite was the year we made a gingerbread Stiffs, Inc concert. They’re my favorite band and they loved the gingerbread portrayal! Notably, Twilight was our last and that was five years ago. We need to get on it next year!

5. Back when Laurence was three years old, he went as a pirate for Halloween. We used eyeliner to draw a scruffy beard on him, because we knew he wouldn’t keep a cotton-ball beard on. We found out later that he was terrified that if he moved his mouth, the eyeliner would drip into it and he’d swallow it, so he held his mouth in this semi-open position all night. Ha! (Next to him, Ambrose dresses as Harry Potter and Morrigan dresses as Stewart Little.)

6. Death and Baby Death had been a part of our family since the early 2000s, but their Book Hour videos on Youtube began in 2009, and they joined us for our Halloween celebrations that year.

7. Because Halloween falls the night before NaNoWriMo starts, I have a lot of great memories over the years finishing up the Halloween-related stuff and getting ready to burst out of the gates for my wordcount. 😀 Pictured is the midnight kickoff in 2015.

8. The Night Circus. I really don’t need to say more than that, I think.

9. Halloween morning, 2014, Boston. Laurence, in full costume, passes me as I’m making coffee. I point to my coffee mug, which is Slytherin-themed, and say, “Slytherin mug.” Laurence stops for a few seconds, points to his vampire-slicked-back-hair, and says, “Slytherin hair.” That still cracks me up every time I think of it. (Laurence was technically an assassin that year, while Ambrose dressed as Luke Skywalker and Morrigan decided he was “too old” to dress up.)

10. And okay, there is some bookish stuff here, because Halloween just wouldn’t be complete without the RIP reading event and the autumn Readathon.

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.