Shiny happy people holding hands or whatever.

On this day last year, I was all in a tizzy about how I felt our Halloween traditions and rituals weren't enough and that we needed to be more festive. Now I'm calling my own bullshit.

No... our traditions are perfectly fine for who we are and what we want. We aren't the apple-picking or pumpkin-carving type and I'm finally accepting it. It's not the we don't have our own Fall traditions - we do. They just don't fit into some stylized ideal of middle-class stuff white people on uppers like. They involve home-made costumes and attending the downtown parade and not going trick-or-treat OR having trick-or-treaters on our street and making salmon cakes for dinner that are made to look like jack-o-lanterns and that's completely fine by me.

They seem to be fine with it too.

Never before has a photo so accurately summed up our mother/son relationship.

Fish fingers and custard.

Expected traditions BE DAMNED, we're doing our own thing and loving it. No reason to over-analyze it.