Happy Halloween

The younger child decided to be Ivan, from The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. Not the scariest costume if one knows Ivan, the sweet and adorable gorilla. He had a mask in his Dress Up cubby and had black pants and black shirt, so, the costume was easy enough for him to put together.

The older child decided to trick or treat as a Voodoo Doll. Chopsticks and large pompoms became the pins for this costume which I did not help make at all.

Pumpkins got carved, Jack-O-Lanterns lit, pumpkin seeds roasted, trick-or-treating done in the neighborhood...

Your Skeleton is Showing: Rhymes of Blunder from Six Feet Under by Kurt Cyrus, illustrated by Crab Scrambly is a popular read around this time, as is the old favorite By the Light of the Halloween Moon by Caroline Stutson, illustrated by Kevin Hawkes.

As always, this poem from Halloween Hoots and Howls by Joan Horton, illustrated by JoAnn Adinolfi is the reigning champion:

"Woe is me," the pumpkin said. 

"They plucked me from my garden bed, 

Hollowed all my innards out, 

And with a joyful whoop and shout, 

Carved two eyes, a nose, a grin, 

And stuck a lighted candle in. 

Next they set me on a post 

Where every goblin, ghoul, and ghost, 

Howling, prowling through the night, 

Filled my orange skull with fright." 

"As if that wasn't bad enough," 

The pumpkin grumbled in a huff, 

"They later baked me in a pie, 

And now they're eating me -- GOOD-BYE!"

A Magic Rainbow and a Mummy

Come September. One of the coveted LPs from my dad's collection. (Which he just gave away to some stranger, along with the HMV turntable). To this day I cannot say these two ordinary words together without the tune ringing in my head...

Well, anyway, I was going say, Come October, the house buzzes with talks of pumpkin and harvest and Deepavali and Mama's birthday... and for the last few years also CROCUS at Saffron Tree.

Plus, of course, Costumes.

I've expounded enough about Halloween here before, so, will skip that thought except to record that I am not fond of spooky stuff. Just personally. It manages to disturb me enough with no ROI that it hasn't been worth it for me. I cannot watch horror movies for sure - just peeking between the cracks in the fingers over my eyes seems too much of an effort to sustain for an hour plus.

So, of course, I don't encourage spooky stuff for the kids.

However, I have no objections to people getting their thrills. D for one loves off-beat horror, cult classics, weird stuff. He is a well-adjusted human being. (As far as I know). So, no judgments is my motto on this. For adults.

However, growing up in a culture that celebrates a festival every other day, with actual customs and manner of celebration varying form region to region, family to family in India, I have come to look upon Halloween and Thanksgiving as reasons to set up a tradition that I am comfortable with and hopefully pass on to the kids.

Coming from a tradition where death anniversary of the family's forebears are observed in a solemn manner, it didn't seem odd for me to read a book about Dia de los Muertos to my kids. And it was quite fun for Ana to do a related craft with her friends.

I still remember the joy and wonder I felt when I watched D carve a huge pumpkin on my first birthday as a newlywed. He made it look so easy and effortless and I loved the way the candle shone through carved pumpkin Jack-o-lantern.

So, pumpkin carving has become a firm tradition for the last decade. Kids have gotten into it. Ana and Oggie scoop out the innards, separate the pulp and seeds so I can roast the seeds for the next week's snack.

Dress-up is always fun. Especially if it comes out of one's imagination. With that in mind, I've tried to encourage the kids to come up with costume ideas. I cannot forget Ana's first. How stubbornly sure she was about being a Peanut Butter Jelly Sandwich!

Now, it's not like Halloween sneaks up on us unawares on anything, but for some reason, Ana and Oggie don't settle on their costume until just a week or two before Oct 31st. Which leaves us scrambling to get it ready in time.

This year's costume discussion started with Oggie leaning strongly towards Watermelon, his favorite fruit.

I was pushing for squid in a not-so-subtle way - with ulterior motive, of course, and not because of some strange love for the sea creature. See, I was particularly thrilled about the Octopus costume I had made last year.

After a lot of back and forth, with me tossing out some of his cute ideas as I wasn't up to making the costume, we settled on Mummy.

Thanks to the Boston MFA trip and the Egyptian wing there, Oggie was fascinated with mummies. Now, he doesn't quite get that it is just dead people, preserved. he thinks they are a special species. Anyway, so, Mummy it was.

How to make a mummy costume? Well, I sort of made it up. And it worked out rather okay. Oggie has very specific dislikes so I couldn't just wrap him up more. He was willing to wear a hat but refused to be wrapped up anymore than that, so, his costume had to be simplified: A partially unwrapped Mummy.

Ana has come up with interesting ones in the last few years and this year was no exception. She very firmly said she wanted to be The Magic Rainbow With A Pot O' Gold At The End!

How to make a magic rainbow costume? Well, I tossed around cardboard cut-outs, strips-of-color outfit and such. After googling around a bit, I loved the cutie here: Sunshine and Rainbow. And that's what I did, with a few edits.

Which parent willingly allows a steady candy diet? None that I know of... The kids' dentist says indulge them once a year, rather than small sugary treats on a regular basis. Enough said on that already... refrain from insufferable preachiness I remind myself.

Anyway, pencils, erasers, little activity books, apples, are all fun to hand over when the doorbell rings with the Trick-Or-Treaters waiting eagerly... However...

Happy Halloween!

Octopus, Blue Flower and Pumpkins

Last year, it was a ghost and a hand-me-down giraffe costume. It was simple. No fuss.

And dress up is a fun activity, not necessarily restricted to one day in a year. Especially since the Dad in the house is unbelievably sportive, no fuss, no pretensions, not much vanity to inhibit the spirit of things...

Anyway, Ana wanted to design her own costume this year. After considering a pickle and Shaggy (yes, she likes Scooby-Doo, thanks to her dad), she settled on being a flower. A blue flower. Like bluebells. Maybe more teal blue than purplish blue. With petals standing up on the head, not around the face. Maybe not bell-shaped petals per se. Leaves around the neck. Body is the stem.

As she started describing it, we talked some more, and I sketched a possible outfit.

And, since Og naturally tunes into Ana's enthusiasm and interests, he began throwing out suggestions as well. First, he wanted to be a crane - the machine, not the bird. Then, a zebra. Finally, after talking it over with his dad, he decided to be an Octopus. A blue octopus.



Here's some sewing notes on making the costumes



Keeping up the tradition of carving pumpkins, D, the resident carver-extraordinaire, listened to each of the kids' ideas and worked his magic. The two smaller pumpkins from our home-garden were for the adults in the house to design and carve. Mine is just a hint of a kitty in the pumpkin. And D's is a small yet fairly menacing pumpkin-head.



We used two larger pumpkins from the Pumpkin Patch for the kids. Og needed some leading questions, naturally. Do you want circle nose or triangle nose? Square eyes or circle eyes? How many teeth? and so on... which he answered with the confidence and precision only a 2 year old commands :)

Ana designed her pumpkin to be a fairy house. It was quite complicated as in her drawing below. After talking it over with her dad, she made some adjustments in her design and together they came up with an executable plan.



The kids enjoyed scooping out the innards, so, I pretended to be busy elsewhere.



Oggie helped separate and collect the seeds from the pulp, which got roasted in the oven to become a nutrition-packed snack:

1. Rinse and soak the raw pumpkin seeds in enough water with a tablespoon of soy sauce stirred in, for an hour or even up to overnight (can skip this - I just do it to get the seeds salty enough rather than sprinkling salt afterwards)
2. Roast in the oven at 275 °F for about 45mins to an hour
3. Heat some Smart Butter Omega™ Light with some brown sugar - a tablespoon each per half cup of pumpkin seeds (more if preferred); add the roasted and slightly-cooled pumpkin seeds, stir till sugar caramelizes a bit
4. Sprinkle some ground nutmeg, cinnamon, paprika, black or cayenne pepper, or any favorite blend of spices

I just got over a stomach flu, and Ana just recovered today from similar symptoms... overindulging in candy is not really an issue as we don't. Over-indulging in roasted pumpkin seeds? For sure!

Jack of the Lantern

...You were once a yellow pumpkin, Growing on a sturdy vine;
Now you are my Jack O'Lantern, Let your candle light shine.

Ana's full-throated rendition of this cute little song has been echoing in her school and home for the past couple of weeks, signaling the joys of the harvest season.

I treasure the pumpkin seeds much like the Native Americans apparently did. And since all of us at home simply love eating them for a snack, I enjoy making a good-sized batch around this season.

Considering the several scoops of seeds tangled up with the innards of the pumpkins we were carving, it was just a matter of cleaning and extracting them, soaking in salted water and roasting in the oven, to enjoy the unique taste and texture of fresh roasted pumpkin seeds.

Pushing aside the grim Irish folklore surrounding Jack O'Lantern, blurring cultural delineations by drawing parallels between 'drishti bommai' of Tamil Nadu this year, we enthusiastically kept up our tradition of carving pumpkins, as we have done for the past several years, around the end of October.

Ana 'designed' the Jack O'Lanterns: she drew the eyes, nose and mouth on the pumpkin that Appa carved out in his inimitable effortless style. Oggie 'helped' by trying to put the top back on the pumpkin when we kept taking it off to scoop out the innards, while I acted busy cooking dinner and taking pictures :)

I do like to ramble at times, don't I? I was getting to it: The Costume!

After several attempts at swaying her young mind, I tucked my tail between me legs when a firm, "I already told you, Amma, I don't want to be anything else!" settled the issue, and let Ana wear the exactly what she wanted - viz., A Ghost Costume!

Boo!

I know, I know... quite a let down after PBJ last year. But, her mind was made-up and I respected her resolve, heaving a huge sigh of relief, thanking the stars for making it so darned easy this year :)

Of course, for another year or two, Oggie won't know the difference, so he gets Ana's hand-me-down costumes. Which is how he ended up in a 3-year-old well-maintained giraffe costume that Ana outgrew, to go trick or treating with his Appa and Ana...

... while I stayed home to greet the kids ringing our doorbell...

... and snatching the opportunity to write this update.

No HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) in the candies handed out. Sugar? Yes, wouldn't be candies otherwise. But, certified organic and made with real fruit seemed to take the focus away from sugar.

Now, I know, I have to just let kids have their little ultra-sweet moments - gosh! haven't I gorged at every Deepavali, every Krishna Janmashtami, every Ganesha Chathurthy, every Pongal, every Vishu, every month on some pretext of festival?!

Considering we don't buy candy otherwise, it seems like a nice way to let Ana enjoy a few within reason... deprivation is not a great answer to developing healthy eating habits, but, that has to wait for another post...