We had a fun Halloween here! We had two little pumpkins in our house! We like the fun of dressing up and carving a pumpkin, trick-or-treating... while trying to limit the amount of candy! Some interesting reading on how Hallowe'en (which is the shortened form of All Hallow's Eve, All Hallows meaning All Saints, which is the solemnity celebrated on November 1st) - and how it is not just a secular holiday full of gore and commercialism but actually has Christian roots - can be found here.
Caroline and Cecilia carried some old McDonald's Happy Meal plastic pumpkins from 1998... I had bought them in college, reminiscent of the ones they had in the 80s which my mom wouldn't take us to get... and I saved them.
On Friday, Caroline's class at her Mothers' Morning Out trick-or-treated around the school. The girls seemed to be over their colds for the most part, so I took Caroline just for this part. Here she is doing a pumpkin song with the group in which they sing about buying pumpkins at a patch - they traded their teacher a coin for a little toy pumpkin as they went around the circle.
Caroline's whole class posing together in a hallway while they were going trick-or-treating to each room.
Cecilia didn't know what to make of it...
Caroline wanted the jack-o-lantern to have circle eyes (with eyelashes but no pupils), a triangle nose, and a smile with two teeth on top and two on the bottom. I sketched it onto the pumpkin and Daddy carved it out.
Cecilia enjoyed looking inside to see the candle. She loved wearing her costume on Friday, Saturday, and last week at my mom's preschool. She got irritated when we had to take it off!
Caroline's costume was mine in 1984, when I was five years old. It used to have a jack-o-lantern mask that went with it, but that has gotten misplaced. I was going to put Cecilia in the other old jack-o-lantern costume that my little brothers wore... but we couldn't find it. My mom made both of those costumes. But I did find this jack-o-lantern costume for Cecilia at a consignment sale. The girls wanted to match, as they so often like to do!
Our friends down the street invited us to come to their cul-de-sac for a hot dog roast dinner on Halloween! It had been raining all day, so we gathered in the home one of the neighbors. Caroline poses with her friend Brianna, who was a ladybug.
Caroline got to try roasting a hot dog over the fire pit... it was too hot for her and she only lasted a few minutes. Cecilia looks like she is roasting her pumpkin bucket in the background...
Look at all the food - YUM!! We had the hotdogs, veggies and dip, a taco-type dip with chips, cheese and crackers, strawberries, turtle-type candies (square pretzels with a Rolo candy melted on top and a pecan pressed into the top!!), and homemade donuts!!! That street knows how to party! ;)
Cecilia eating some dinner with Daddy
The Johnston and Lewis kids (minus 3 month old Alex), ready to trick-or-treat after the party. We had a ladybug, two pumpkins, Little Red Riding Hood, a clown, and Spiderman. I have a clown costume that Cecilia could have worn, but Caroline wanted them to match and I thought it'd be cute... but it also would have been cute if both of the one year olds had been clowns! I think if you click on this picture, you can see it larger.And now on to November!
Happy Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day to everyone!
Happy Halloween, All Saints Day, and All Souls Day to everyone!
3 comments:
Did you trade the girls for their candy? The Great Pumpkin visits us and takes away all uneaten candy, leaving a healthier treat. This year we got star fruit and a pineapple.
That's a fun idea... we just go through the candy and pick out all the stuff that is a choking hazard (I am still concerned about that a bit with a four yr old) and anything really nasty, like those colored gummy things shaped like hamburgers (eeeewwww!). We remove most of the stuff w/ artificial colors too. So Caroline ends up with four or five little candy bars, a pack or two of M & M's, some Goldfish or pretzels... she doesn't really notice that she ends up w/ half of what she had. I keep it up high and she can have one piece a day. I know when she is older, she'll have more control over the matter and end up keeping most of it.
We sort through all of tha candy, too and put it in bags VERY high up in the cabinet! It gets doled out one piece at a time. By the time Christmas rolls around, and there is candy in the stockings, we still have Halloween candy left and it's gets thrown out to make room for the newer stuff. We also had a hot dog roast with some neighbors - it's so much fun with all the kids go trick-or-treating together. They call is a Hallow-weenie Roast....!
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