Home-made Halloween

Every year it seems like there are more and more Halloween events and parties going on, especially if there are children involved. Spooky train rides, craft fairs, walks in the woods, witch and wizard parties, endless Halloween costumes. The supermarket aisles have been loaded with plastic orange and black paraphernalia since September. The events get advertised months in advance, I get a bit jaded with it all, and then I end up feeling like a total scrooge if I don’t buy into it for Mole and Hedgehog, which I’m guessing is what the event organisers are counting on.

Mole LOVES Halloween. Last year she went trick or treating with Mr M&H and wore a permanent grin on her face as she watched her sweetie basket get fuller and fuller. This year she is already wearing her pumpkin dress to preschool in preparation.

In an effort to remind myself what Halloween is actually all about, I googled it. Google tells me that… “Straddling the line between fall and winter, plenty and paucity, life and death, Halloween is a time of celebration and superstition. It is thought to have originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off roaming ghosts”. Wow, ‘ancient Celtic festival’, I like the earthiness of it.

So where do pumpkins come into it? again, google tells me it was an Irish tradition, who brought it with them in the immigrant wave to North America where it became popular in the 19th Century. It makes sense that pumpkins would feature as part of the harvest and also a convenient carving vegetable.

I would love to honour Halloween in style like the Celts did it, light bonfires and wear costumes and dance around, it all sounds very primal. Mole and Hedgehog would probably love it. But where would we light a bonfire? having one in our postage stamp size garden would not be a wise move. It was probably easier to light bonfires when we lived in tribes in the wilderness. So failing a full on Samhain festival with ritual dancing, I’ll focus on the food and harvest side of Halloween, aka the pumpkin.

There is a Pumpkin festival in a nearby village, which as well as carving your own pumpkin, includes pony rides, face painting, craft corner, and tumbling teddies. It’s a guaranteed winner, and being free entry, is also a winner with my scrooge pocket. So that is what we’re doing on Saturday.

I’ll do a pumpkin soup for Sunday, complete with cinnamon and chunky bread, and then on the big day we’ll put the pumpkin lanterns on our front step in our nod to Halloween, and also remember to get some marshmallows in for the trick-or-treaters. Last year we forgot, and the little tykes had to make do with cake sprinkles.

It looks likely that Mole will be part of the trick-or-treating brigade again, which will last about as long as Mr M&H’s endurance levels against the cold. So I’ll be staying in the warm with Hedgehog, eating the marshmallows, and reading a suitably spooky bed time story, like Winnie the Witch.

Here’s to our home-made Halloween. I might even get the mulled wine out, and we can watch a spooky film once Mole and Hedgehog have come down from their marshmallow high and crashed out in bed.

Awesome.