Today is Halloween (although it’s been going on since Friday night). Get ready for an exhausting day. Don’t worry, it’ll all be over by 9 p.m. Thank goodness it’s a school night. The Park Slope Civic Council’s 18th Annual Park Slope Halloween Parade begins at 6:30 p.m. at 12th Street and goes down Seventh Avenue to Berkeley Place.

This from the Park Slope Civic Council web site:

This year the parade will be preceded by a party for children and their families at the YMCA on 9th Street.

Ours of course is not the only Halloween Parade in town. If you’re from, say, Oklahoma or some similarly obscure place, you will probably have heard only of the larger parade in our more ostentatious neighboring borough across the river. That’s good enough for us! What we lack in fame and sheer numbers, we more than make up for in local charm. We may not boast the extravagant crowds and costumes of the Village Parade, but we have a most impressive array of pint-sized witches and goblins -often accompanied by their proud parents as well as their family pets in unusual attire!

The Parade is clearly a hit with our neighboring Brooklyn communities. People have been known to come from as far as Windsor Terrace, and perhaps even beyond, to join in the festivities

What’s your favorite part of Halloween in Park Slope? Is it the after-school trick-or- treating along 7th Avenue, where we take advantage of the shopkeepers for yet another year? Could it be the Headless Horseman, rumored to be a charming woman named Fran from Kensington Stables underneath that scary exterior? Maybe it’s the in-line skaters, swooping ahead of the parade and looking like Black Bloc anarchists? Or is it the jazzy samba beat of Vanessa’s samba band, particularly, when the police don’t notice and shut it down, or the final, intense rhythm circle near the parade’s Berkeley Place terminus? For some it might be the animal companions in scary attire, together with their FIDO host humans. Or is it the parade itself?

The Parade continues to evolve, although thankfully at an appropriately glacial pace. It has already spawned several subsidiary traditions, such as the Black Light Puppet Show, a production of Theatre Group Dzieci, held each Halloween evening in Garfield Place. Several other local theater groups make irregular appearances in the Parade from year to year.