My God – Hallowe’en is huge in this country. Even as early as the beginning of October, the decorations started going up. There were skeletons and ghouls hanging from porches, tombstones in gardens, spiders’ webs everywhere, and pumpkins by the thousand. Prize for the best Hallowe’en display we saw goes to this house, with Clinton and Trump fighting and being refereed by a zombie (this is the ONLY election reference in this entire blog, I promise):
In the UK, Hallowe’en – despite its growing popularity – is really a bit of an afterthought. It’s only a few days before that the pumpkins start to appear in force, and trick-or-treating is still a bit ad hoc. Over here, it’s the first in a three-month holiday season: first Hallowe’en then, when the gibbeted ghouls have been cut down, the Thanksgiving decorations go up and the President pardons a turkey (maybe this year the turkey will be Hillary Clinton – oh sorry, broken my promise there), then the Thanksgiving decorations come down and the Christmas decorations go up, and before you know it we are in to the New Year and the Presidential Inauguration.
Of course, the schools got in on the act too – the kids dressed up for school, and they had a Hallowe’en carnival, then the actual day was a holiday. The evening, as you can imagine, involved a great deal of trick-or-treating. Mostly just treating, actually. The little kids ran round like crazy things grabbing sweeties (candy) at every house they could find. The bigger kids tried to dress scary, which worked until the voice from behind the Scream mask was that of an unbroken teenage boy. Keep trying, chum. Some adults got very into it, dressing up – see the overgrown Oompa Loompa here. Something about the colour of his skin reminds me of someone I’ve seen on the TV a lot recently (there I go again!)
Others just trailed behind their over-sugared children. Luckily a couple of public-spirited dads were handing out beer to harassed parents who looked thirsty. Alice managed to collect more candy than you can shake a stick at; given her current rate of two sweeties per day, she will be finished eating them some time in 2018.
Bonus photo: our house looking spooky. I should enter this in one of those iPhone photography competitions.
South of the Mason-Dixon line 