Mountain Treats

I debated whether or not to put up a post about Halloween Candy, but then decided that it's not JUST about Halloween Candy, it's about Mountain Living and why we love living up here in these gorgeous New Mexico mountains that we fondly call our home.

You see, we sort of live in a neighborhood. There are six houses on our gravel road. We know everyone in each of those houses, first and last names. We also know at least 4 of our other neigbors that live on the outskirts of our neighborhood. We have met them while out hiking, walking llamas, dogs, and riding horses. Everyone is very nice and quite welcoming; always glad to see us. We all have between 3-10 acres and are located in a lovely valley surrounded by mountains, trees, ridgetops, and gorgeous sunrises and sunsets.

So, we have quite a bit to be grateful for.
Last year my kids and I chose to drive into Albuquerque to do our trick-or-treating, thinking we could just park in a neighborhood and walk from door-to-door while the kids could hit many more houses than they could do out here, where houses are separated by acres, not fences and walls.

The kids figured that they'd get alot more candy in the city, then here in our little mountain town. Boy! They were wrong.

Yes, we could visit more houses in the city, but we discovered that the pickings tend to be slimmer, usually just one or two pieces of candy per kids. And the candy variety usually leaned toward the icky side...lots of tootsie rolls, fire balls, necco wafers, hard candy, mary janes, and sweet tarts. Chocolate bars were rare.

We discovered last night, that Trick-or-Treating in our mountains means alot more generosity, in not only, amount, but type of candy given out. And the homeowners that greeted us were not only welcoming, but absolutely thrilled to have us come beg for candy. They didn't just drop one piece of candy into the kid's bags, they begged them to grab handfuls of goodies from their candy bowls. And if the kids didn't take, what they thought was enough, they grab some more candy to dump into my kids' bags. My kidlets were thrilled, to say the least.

Some of the folks even gave out baggies stuffed full of fun goodies such as toys, mini-coloring books, pencils and book markers, along with the candy. And there were several homes in the Halloween spirit who did entire haunted trails with music, lights, fog and spooky dioramas. And at one house, we were even invited in to their festive and friendly Halloween party. What fun!

My kids weren't able to run from house to house, like the city kids do, but they got really good at hopping out of my van and scooting through any Halloween decorated open gates and trotting up those long twisting driveways to the waiting candy-givers.

While we were out we noticed several mountain neighborhoods utilizing hay wagons to cart kids and families around to trick-or-treat. What a brilliant idea, I thought. And it was fun to wave and wish everyone a Happy Halloween as we drove by them.

By the end of the night we visited less than 20 houses. But when we dumped all the candy the kids had gathered, onto the kitchen table, we were all pretty darned amazed at how much was there.

Do you wanna see our Halloween Loot?
Not too bad for trick-or-treating in the rural mountains, eh?

We hope everyone had a safe, and wonderfully fun Halloween!!