Of Pumpkins and Candy!

Coming from Africa, halloween has never been a big deal. Of course, in the US of A it is!

I came through to Rocklin early for the weekend, as I had been requested to help with carving pumpkins on Thursday night. That is remarkably easy and was good fun. Erin did one of the pumpkins (on the right) and I did the other.

On Friday evening (after the long-suffering Freckles had been decked out in his Yankee Doodle costume!), a friend of Erin's came around and the two of them set off to scrounge candy off the neighbours, with Colin and I in attendance to keep an eye on the young ladies (and to ensure that the candy was of a suitable standard!). Before long, our group had swollen its numbers considerably and Colin and I were "guarding" a rather large group of rather loud pre-teenage girls trick-or-treating the neighbourhood. At one stage it started to rain quite hard and we offered shelter by a kindly neighbour.

Many of the people had gone to great lengths to decorate their homes — fake cobwebs, pumpkins by the truck-load, strobes lights, flashing illuminated bats, and various other ghoulish decor items were liberally on display!

The evening ended off with the group gathered around the Hobson kitchen table, sheltering from the rain and drinking hot chocolate while the adults sat in the lounge with glasses of red wine and dealt with one or two last visitors in search of candy (business was apparently quite slow chez Hobson, which has left us with the most unfortunate problem of a slight candy mountain that needs to be dealt with!).

I have to confess that it all seems like rather a lot of effort to extort candy from kindly neighbours, but the kids were all having fun, and there was a great neighbourhood vibe out on the streets.