Halloween. Festive Season 2 of 3

Once October hits, it seems like there is festive season after festive season. Thanksgiving, Halloween, then Christmas. There are decorations and everything that goes with each of these events. It's full on! In Canada, the gap between Halloween and Christmas is the biggest. Conveniently this is the biggest change over, as many houses go all out for both events.

Just a giant evil cat watching some ladies! Me trying to be Kate Moss. Failing.

The weekend before Halloween, we went to a house party that has the sweetest Halloween set up you've ever seen. Interior and exterior was wild! I can't really do it justice trying to explain it, you'll have to take my work for it that it was impressive.

<1% of the decorations!

For actual Halloween we took it pretty easy and had a dinner at our house for fellow friends that didn't want to deal with trick or treaters. Living in a Condo and down a long driveway is beneficial if you don't want to hand out chocolates. Once again we bough a giant box of chocolates "just in case", but have since eaten the majority of them ourselves. Win, win! We didn't carve our pumpkins until Halloween night this year. This prevented the soggy faces that we experienced on October the 31st last year.

Guess which is mine, and which is O'Hara's. You can tell we don't have stencils!

That weekend Kamloops had its first snowfall! Finally. I think the best way to describe my (un-ladylike) excitement for the snowboardings season is "frothing"? I'll have to check with the baby brother if I've used that word correctly in a sentence. I can't wait. 3 weeks!

Take selfie with snow in hair. Check

Trick or Treat!

Just in case you still don't know, we do NOT celebrate Halloween in Australia. Yes I know, it's your favourite, and our childhoods must have been lacking something special. Similar to the fact we don't get snow at Christmas, and the whole red and white thing invented by Coke doesn't seem quite as magical. LUCKILY I survived and moved to a country that has both snow at Christmas AND Halloween. Luckiest girl alive? I think so.

So, Australians generally have something against Halloween because it is perceived as an "American" holiday. Since apparently we're the most racist country, it could be that. I think it's more likely that America just isn't "cool" in Australia. I don't know why, I love the place, but it's true.

An interesting fact however, Halloween isn't an American holiday at all. According to Wikipedia, Halloween is widely believed to have originated as a Celtic/Pagan harvest festival. Wikipedia says (which is obviously a reliable source) there's no evidence of Halloween in America until the mass Irish and Scottish immigration in the 19th century. Guess what Australia? Ireland and Scotland are cool! Embrace Halloween, it's really fun (though possibly the least healthy and worst influence on children).

So Halloween was last week, and we dressed up for work and had a delicious scary lunch. I made the mistake of having a costume that Canadians just didn't get. I thought it would be funny (and in Australia it would have been hilarious. Honest). I was a Wallaby. As in wearing Wallaby rugby gear... and ears. When I went out at night I also had whiskers... cool right?! Yeaaa, someone when I was trick or treating (I was escorting some kids) said he thought my accent was Kiwi. RUDE. I said that was offensive given what I was wearing, like asking someone in a Canadian hockey jersey if they were American. Yeaaa, how do you like them apples?!

I wana be a Wallaby!

Also, remember those awesome pumpkins we carved? Don't do that 2 weeks before Halloween. They go mouldy. It's not a good look. We made a new one.

Pumpkins and the cold misty Halloween night

We're preparing for Halloween!

Halloween is just over a week away! We've been a little lame with out decorations but we went all out with the pumpkin carving. The process started with a trip to the Pumpkin Patch! It was a slightly chilly and windy day, but we got picked up by friends and taken to choose some pumpkins.

Choosing pumpkins can be hard work, they have the be the perfect size, shape and colour. We worked out that getting a slightly green one is handy, as they ripen up quickly when inside and if it's very orange it may turn a little soggy...

Looking for the perfect one

Alexis and Hal connecting with their pumpkins

This is the one!

Then comes the fun part. Carve time! 

I made the best decision ever and spent $5 on pumpkin carving tools at Super Store. This included  a scraping tool for taking out all the junk inside, a little pricker thing to transfer the outline of your carving and a mini saw. The scraper and the mini saw were the best purchase ever. O'Hara was convinced we'd be able to do it with a steak knife. Ahh boys...

If anyone has tried to do pumpkin carving in Australia and struggled, it turns out they use a special type of pumpkin. You can't eat these ones and they have really soft flesh (probs why they taste bad) and are super easy to carve. I remember trying to carve pumpkins as a kid with ones we'd grown at home. It was a battle!

The worst thing. O'Hara was significantly better at carving pumpkins than me. How is this even possible? But he took way more care and made a hilarious cyclopes pumpkin. Mine unfortunately looked like a child carved it. Luckily my bat pumpkin was mildly more successful.

The tools and what it made!

I think my pumpkin looks like me with missing teeth