Day 50: Happy

Reformation Day and Halloween!

I can't believe it's already the end of October. It seems like it was summer about a week ago. Halloween is when summer officially ends for me, I guess :) Yesterday was so much fun. We did all of our "Halloween-y" things. Carving pumpkins, reading Edgar Allen Poe by light of jack-o-lanterns (and flashlight), roasting pumpkin seeds, and even trick-or-treating a day early, which you'll hear more about later.

It was a beautiful fallish day, around 75 degrees with a beautiful cool breeze. We carved the pumpkins on our back deck.



Ellen drew the design on her pumpkin. I think it's pretty adorable :)



Yes, I was wearing a tank top and shorts. It really was that warm. (The day before I was wearing a winter coat and boots. Oh, St. Louis.)

We've been planning on putting twinkle lights up on our back deck for ages, and I finally did it yesterday. They looked really cool in the dark. 

We heard loud music from a school behind our house, so Ellen, Mary and I made the journey through the "woods" in our backyard (a tangle of trees and bushes with a little path cut through) to the gate that goes into the school's baseball field, and discovered that they were having a whole Trunk or Treat thing (where hundreds of cars park in parking spots and kids go down the rows and get candy. Pretty much Trick-or-Treating but safer [you won't get run over by cars or kidnapped], and you get a lot more candy.) Andrew and I took Ellen and Mary down there, and it was a blast. It was seriously one of the most fun things I've done in quite a while. There were decorations everywhere, and everyone was so nice, and there were all kinds of fun things to do- Ellen and I even went on a Clydesdale-drawn hay ride.

...And I got a whole lot of candy. (I have no idea why I felt compelled to change the color of those words...)

That is a lot of candy. That pile is really as tall and wide as it looks. And that's just my candy. And trick-or-Treating hasn't even officially happened yet. I wasn't going to go Trick-or-Treating this year, but so much for that. Now to try to keep myself from eating all of this at once.

One of the best parts about carving pumpkins is rosting the seeds. A little bit of cooking spray and some salt, baked in the oven for a while... and you have delicious in a bowl. (I've heard you can also make them with cinnamon and sugar. I've never tried it, but it sounds good.)

  

I'm eating some right now. And they are soooo good. You should really try it sometime.

We have a tradition of every year, on or around Halloween, turning all the lights in the house off and reading "scary stories" (Halloween poems, and Edgar Allen Poe) in the living room, with our jack-o-lanterns lit. I absolutely love the whole concept of jack-o-lanters. First of all, because pumpkins are just so darn cool. And put fire in them? That just has to be a good combination.  

Andrew and my dad didn't carve their pumpkins this year (*tsk, tsk*). But here are the rest of them. (Note: About my pumpkin- I am well aware that music notes don't actually go that way. Unfortunately, I didn't notice this until after I started carving it :))

There. I've got the Halloween part of October 31st covered. Now on to Reformation Day. This post is so long already that I can't really balance it out, also I don't really have many "Reformation Day pictures", but I will show you our traditional Reformation Sunday lunch :)

"Red" "cross-shaped" pancakes!!! (A.K.A. pink blob-shaped pancakes.) Just pancakes with red food coloring. That just turns them pink. Shaped as crosses, which get spread out and are really hard to flip. Exciting, no? :)

Well, not much time to write anything expansive or deep, but let me just say that Martin Luther was a pretty cool dude. Yeah... that was deep.

 

Have a happy Halloween and Reformation Day.