Halloween 2011: Michelle O. Dresses Mother Up as Rabbit!

Michelle Obama doesn’t balk at anything. In Oct. 2009, for her first Halloween at the White House, she made a splash with a delightful cat-woman costume. Saturday, facing election-year pressures and the arctic cold of the capital, she showed up in austere clothes, a black coat and a ballerina bun. No photo of the girls, but their grandmother, Michelle’s mother, Marian Robinson, came dressed for the occasion. At left in the photo, her blow-dried hair is topped with bunny ears. Marvelous, aren’t they? And if all the other “Firsts” are wearing black, it’s the grandmother who rises to the occasion.

Here are some White House Halloween treat recipes — which are, of course, usually forbidden in the dietary programs of Michelle Obama and her “Let’s Move” campaign — but barely enough to calm the anxieties of troubled students in Washington and the unhappy descendents of soldiers on the front of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. President Obama promises that soldiers in Iraq will be home for Christmas, which is better than Halloween at the White House. See you next year, Obamas, with or without a second term!