The District is the best place to spend Halloween in the living world. D.C. is a city where a sign reading “Stop the Capital Braaains Tax” is a welcome part of an undead teabagger’s costume. It’s a pun that might prompt a debate, even! A Halloween party in D.C. often feels like a gore-inflected Sunday morning chat show circuit, with the newsmakers of the week paraded out to explain their relevance. (To be sure, Halloween has a better theme song than Meet the Press.) How many other cities in the nation do you expect witnessed a Bizarro Orly Taitz last night?

That braaaaininess is a wonderful feature of the city, but it is far from all that D.C. Halloween boasts. Right across the river is Georgetown, where you may find regular ol’ slutty celebrity costumes in abundance. I support the people aspect watching of Georgetown’s Halloween people parade and in fact braved the claustrophobia-inducing event twice. This year, I didn’t see any Balloon Boys at all and I only spotted one Octo-Mom and one Green Man apiece — anemic numbers for categories that should rack up multiple pings in any given costumed room. I take great pleasure knowing those costumes are well represented in our city — in Georgetown! — leaving more space for terrible, terrible political puns for me and mine.

This year, classic costumes were in. I saw monks, knights, and even a plain-old normal vampire that neither sparkled in the light nor affected a Louisiana drawl. That at least was the scene at my party and, it would seem, in a few of these pictures.