Halloween

Halloween this year was very low key for us. A couple days before the holiday, I carved our pumpkin that we had brought home from my Mom's garden in Idaho. I loved the way it turned out! I learned that Brian doesn't like to carve pumpkins...he hates how they smell. I didn't know that about him. Maybe that's why he hates pumpkin pie. He just isn't a lover of pumpkins. So I carved it myself. I had so much fun, and as soon as I started scooping out handfuls of icy-cold pumpkin guts, I had flashbacks to my childhood. 

Every year, when the pumpkins in my Mom's garden were still small and green, us kids would go out and lay claim to which pumpkin we wanted. We would lightly carve our initials in the top of our chosen pumpkins near the stem. Then for months we would watch them grow bigger and bigger until, finally, they turned orange. Then on Halloween morning, we would go out and pick our pumpkins (if we hadn't harvested them already because of a hard freeze) and lug them into the house. This got easier as we got bigger. Our carefully carved initials had healed over by this time, creating rough brown scars of our initials... a handy thing when six kids are trying to remember which pumpkin was theirs (it helped secure the ownership of pumpkins that ended up growing bigger and more orange than others' had; there was no stealing anyone's). 

Mom would have the table covered with newspaper and we would cut out the top, or hat as we liked to call it, of our pumpkins. Over the years, each of us overcame our disgust at the slimy pumpkin innards and took on cleaning them out ourselves. Then, after drawing and re-drawing faces on our pumpkins with marker, we would begin carving out eyes, noses and mouths. For a lot of years, we kept to the traditional geometric shapes, but as the years went on we got more creative. A few years, we tried the paper patterns, but I always preferred to come up with my own face. I'm very traditional. Once the carving was finished, we'd each light our candle (the tall white tapered ones) and let some of the melting wax drip onto the center of a canning lid. We'd push the candle's base into the hot wax and hold it in place until the wax cooled, creating a base for the candle. We'd line the pumpkins up on the table, set the candles inside, and turn off all the lights in the house to oooh and aaaah over our work. After we had sufficiently admired our jack o'lanterns, we'd carry them outside and line them up down either side of the stairs to our front door. Every Halloween without fail, six pumpkins glittered through the night as a welcome to neighborhood trick-or-treaters.

It's been probably ten years since I've carved a pumpkin. So it was fun to have a flickering jack o'lantern sitting outside our door on Halloween. His bottom side was quite lopsided, so I had to jerry-rig some folded newspaper underneath him to get him to stay upright.

We went to our Ward Party the night before Halloween. There was a chili potluck, and we brought a pot of Grandma Westover's Chili. The costumes were fun to look at, but we didn't recognize the faces behind them. It was fun, but we are still very new to our ward and don't know a lot of people yet, so we felt a bit out of place. It made us really miss all of our friends in our NYC ward. 

Only one trick-or-treater came to our apartment on Halloween night. I was hoping we'd get at least a few now that we are in Utah. Our ward party included a trunk-or-treat, as is the tradition these days, so I'm sure that's the reason we didn't get any others. At least we got one! That's one more than we every got in NYC.

It seems that around Halloween the leaves in our neighborhood finally started to change colors. One or two trees turned, and then there was an explosion of color. My favorite tree of the season was the one just outside our bedroom window. The picture below doesn't do it justice. I think it is some kind of elm, and it turn this fiery orange-red. It was amazing. The leaves would reflect their blazing color into our bedroom, lighting it up even more than usual. It was my favorite thing to see first thing every morning when I opened our blinds.

I love autumn so much, and it didn't disappoint this year in our new home.