Happy Halloween!

Tis' the day of the year where everyone is encouraged to pretend to be someone else for the day! We opted to go with Bridgerton as out theme this year - and I think we did quite a good job with it! I will say that my dress is sooo long - I need four inch heels just to get it to lie even with the ground.

  

It's important to note that I don't have four inch heels - so my dress has drug along behind me all day long! I even drug some crispy brown leaves into the office on my train this morning, ha-ha! I suppose I will drag my dress along behind me for the rest of the day and hang it up in hopefully decent shape at the end of this Halloween day! 

I figured to honor this happy Halloween holiday - I'd share a look back at the Halloween costumes of the past! 

 

2022 had two costumes - I dressed as Penny from Top Gun alongside my fiancé (husband now) who was dressed as Maverick! We attended a Halloween Party on the 30th and I dressed as Winifred Sanderson alongside my friends Meridith as Mary and Danielle as Sarah... a classic! 

No costumes for 2021 - I guess because Halloween fell on a Sunday, it was every man for himself! It was frigid that year and so I sat in the driveway in all my warm things bundled up and snuggled close with Watson! 

Halloween 2020 was they year of COVID Halloween - so our Founding Fathers costumes included masks! George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton at your service! I kept my feather pen handy to write the Federalist Papers if necessary...

Halloween 2019 was a continuation of our costumes from 2017 - we all dressed as characters from Game of Thrones - but in death. We made a pact that if all three characters we dressed as died, we'd dress in the manner of their death... So Melisandre was fading away to ash - Cersei was under a pile of rubble and Daenerys had a knife in her gut. Good times. Good times.

Halloween 2018 was an easier costume to pull off - we dressed as members of Star Fleet! We had our Commander in Red, our Security forces in Yellow and our Science officer (and Vulcan) in the Blue. This costume is somewhere buried away in the boxes I have; it was by far the easiest to pull off and the most comfortable to wear! 

The costume of choice in 2017 was our Game of Thrones characters in their original and very much alive states! We dressed as Daenerys, Melisandre and Cersei - complete with her ever present glass of wine (grape juice). These costumes were some of our best and really turned out so great! So great that we repeated them - somewhat - just two years later!

And somehow in all my pictures - I've lost the picture(s) of the first time we dressed as the Sanderson Sisters for Halloween! What a trick that is! Oh well! 

Happy Haunting and Happy Hunting (for candy) to everyone who celebrates! 

All the Colors Imaginable!

Well - all the weekends in October have been filled with all the things - and this last one was filled with plenty of wonderful as well. I have to confess that last week was just not my week and I was so glad when 5:00 PM rolled around on Friday! I was glad to be done with work for the week, have a weekend with not much on the agenda and just get a chance to relax. 

Friday night my Mom and I got dinner together and perused Home Goods before I headed home and took a nice bubble bath and ended up going to bed pretty early on Friday night! It was just so nice to crawl into bed and know there was no alarm on Saturday morning!  

Ryan and I slept in on Saturday and after having coffee, we went on a bit of an adventure! We grabbed some breakfast at Waffle House (the pumpkin waffle is delicious) and then headed to our former home town of Woodstock! We perused our favorite consignment shop and poked around in some other awesome thrift stores in Strasburg before heading home to relax a little bit before our evening plans!

Our evening plans: we met friends for dinner at 50/50 Taphouse and then took a Ghost Tour of old town Winchester! It was so much fun to wander the streets and hear stories about all the places that are now restaurants and shops... but were once homes that have some "memories" left behind...

 

 

We made a circuit around old town Winchester, taking in the Handley Library, Kimberly's (where our wedding invitations came from), the Williams House, Indian Alley and essentially every house on the Walking Mall, ha-ha! Our guide said the tour would be four hours if we stopped at every haunted spot on the Walking Mall - eek! 

 

It was a really neat way to spend an evening - a unique date night, if you will! We enjoyed roaming the streets and while I love a good ghost story, I also love history and so the ghost tour was a combination of both and I really enjoyed it! I'd love to go back and wander the Walking Mall again and peek at the houses and restaurants that popped up on the tour! Perhaps we could have our own experience if we had dinner at one of the many restaurants... and perhaps I'd never return if that happened, ha-ha! 

The gorgeous Autumn colors have truly exploded over the last week - especially the Gingko Biloba trees at the Virginia State Arboretum! They are my favorite spot and so after church on Sunday (and some yummy dinner) we headed back over to the Arboretum with our camera and tripod to investigate the stunning colors - and they did not disappoint! 

I will never get over how perfectly golden the leaves of the Gingko trees turn - they are absolutely the most spectacular Autumn sight and I love seeing them each year! 

 

We spent about an hour exploring the perfectly golden gingko grove and then headed home to relax, watch a little football, read some (me) and throw a load of clothes in the wash. We ended up taking a walk around the neighborhood, because some of the leaves in the neighborhood are also pretty spectacularly colored - and I couldn't miss those! 

The weekend ended pretty quietly - we had some homemade chili for dinner, I took a nice bubble bath and Ryan and I called it a night shortly after 9 PM! It was a good weekend and I cannot believe that it was the final weekend of October! 

Halloween is tomorrow - my costume is all ready - and then, it will be November!