This year we had family to visit over Halloween. It was fantastic to welcome our first houseguest family now that we have the room to put them up, but the best bit was they brought children. This meant that we got to do all those things that we never usually do for Halloween.
Halloween is really big business here. The scale of the activites is mind blowing – every farmer with a field has some sot of activities on offer and the shops are packed with Halloween merchandise, costumes, sweets, decorations, cards, pumpkin flavoured anything you can think of….
We went for the full on US experience – (clearly all for the benefit of the kids…) First we went on a hayride (a tractor pulling some trailers with bales of straw you can sit on) and went to choose our own pumpkins from a pumpkin patch. This was obviously followed by as pumpkin carving frenzy, which involved disemboweled pumpkins all over the kitchen.
We also decorated the front porch. I thought we’d done a pretty good job -we had lots of spiderwebs, pumpkins and the piece de resistance was the sound activated spider that pounced on anyone walking on the porch.
It wasn’t until we went out trick or treating with the kids that we realised quite how much people make an effort about Halloween. ALL the kids have costumes –we saw some great ones – my personal favourite was someone dressed as the shower from Psycho, complete with shower rings and curtain. They were slightly incongruously followed by the psycho body scrub. Or was it the psycho loofah? I’m not sure (I don’t think I’ll ever get used to all the non scary costumes – the ladybirds, superheros and princesses.)
It turns out that many people in town make a HUGE effort with decorations – not just a few pumpkins but lights, dummies, things that light up, electonic bats that flap around. My favourite Halloween house was the one that set up a big video screen on the porch and sat around watching scary movies, all the while dispensing sweeties to the hoardes of children. And there really were hoardes of them…all roaming the streets in an Enumber fuelled frenzy.
NB: No of course we didn’t actually go trick or treating! We followed the kids round with a beer wagon! We did get dressed up the night before for a party though…
