Happy New Year everyone! Now that the Christmas–or shall I say holiday!–season has passed, we are all getting back to our normal routines. For me, that means doing a lot less spending and eating. Not that I don't enjoy going broke and getting fat, but from Halloween until the end of December it seems like that's all I'm doing, and it gets a little exhausting. What didn't help our wallets was the furnace and bathroom sink in our house breaking down before I finished all the holiday shopping. Nothing like shelling out a few hundred dollars in the midst of buying everyone you know presents. But with that said, last year is over and 2012 is going to be a whole new adventure.

If you've been following this year's series on ghost towns, I'm sad to say it's over but I'm also glad to be starting something new. For our November/December issue we featured Lille in the Crowsnest Pass. You haven't heard of this once booming mining town? It's actually one of the more popular ghost towns in the area. With this popularity comes a flood of stories, news articles and Google searches, all about Lille. Some stories are credible, some not. This is where the fun part comes in.

One of my favourite holidays of the year is coming up. Actually, I pretty much just love October in general. Halloween is one reason I love October. Secondly, I really love Thanksgiving. It’s a holiday where family gets together and all you really have to buy is the food, which you would have to buy if family was getting together anyways. Christmas is wonderful, but wonderfully expensive too. Getting into the mood of Halloween, we have a spooktacular story in this issue of Lethbridge living about old time Halloween in Lethbridge: what people did to celebrate Halloween and even some haunted stories about places that you’ve probably visited in the city. We couldn’t fit every story into the magazine so I’m going to share some stories that I really enjoyed. All the ghost stories were first told by Belinda Crowson, Museum Educator at the Galt Museum & Archives.