Northern Wyoming News - Serving the Big Horn Basin for over 100 years

Happy Halloween. For children today’s holiday is about fun and candy. Children get to dress up in costume, perhaps as their favorite superhero, favorite villain, favorite Disney princess or movie character or they get creative and make up their own costume.

There are plenty of opportunities for children to go trick-or-treating in Worland and Ten Sleep with many organizations and businesses hosting trick-or-treat or trunk-or-treat festivities. There’s a story listing the many events in today’s paper.

But Halloween is not just a holiday for children.

Growing up I never perceived Halloween as an adult holiday. My parents did not dress up, even when they took us trick-or-treating around Hamilton Dome. They never went to Halloween parties.

Today you will see adults dressed up with their children. And if you go to many businesses around town you will see some adults go all out with their Halloween costumes. It is an opportunity for adults to channel their inner child if only for a day. And, of course, there are many adult Halloween costume parties.

Adults in the businesses also got creative this year with their entries in the Worland-Ten Sleep Chamber of Commerce scarecrow contest. There are some wonderful scarecrows in front of many businesses. If you haven’t checked them out just take a walk around downtown, as well as some businesses on the side streets.

And, let’s not forget the great pumpkin hunt sponsored by RT Communications. While it is young Linus waiting every year in the pumpkin patch in “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown,” it was adults scrambling all over Worland last week in search of the RT pumpkin.

This was the fourth year that RT has sponsored the contest but this was the first year our office attempted to discover the location of the pumpkin. We had a lot of fun in the office trying to figure out the clues. The best part, however, came last Thursday when the one clue was about old and new photos and we got to watch people come and scour our parking lot looking for the RT pumpkin.

We could have went out and told them we were looking for the pumpkin too and knew it wasn’t here but it was more entertaining to watch them.

It was fun to go to different places and watch people searching high and low for the pumpkin.

And for the record, we did figure out the location early in the week, we were just unsuccessful in actually finding it. Congratulations to Mag-Pie Martinez for her diligence in finding it this year.

So whether young or old, I hope you find time for a little fun today and every day.

** ** **

And a reminder to set your clocks back one hour before going to bed Saturday night. I never understand the Facebook memes about how hard it is to change the clocks in your vehicles. It is easy to change the clocks in all of our vehicles, much easier than finding the right combination on my digital watch.

Thank goodness cell phones change automatically.

It is also a good time to change or at least check the batteries in your smoke detectors.

And do not waste time wondering why we are still doing this because you will never get a rational answer. Some say daylight saving time saves energy but really it just moves daylight from the morning to the evening so you are burning lights in the morning instead of at night.

Changing it back moves the darkness from the morning to the night so instead of coming to work in the dark at 7 a.m. I will be going home in the dark at 5 p.m. next week.

The one nice thing about more daylight in the morning is that children having to wait for school buses will not be waiting in the dark as long.