![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I don't think I'm very good at Halloween. I could blame this on coming from a country where it isn't really a big thing at all - it seems to be getting a little more Americanized each year, but for the most part I remember that you just noticed it was the end of October and then spent the evening pulling your teeth out while trying to eat biscuits off the washing line or pushing your friends' heads under a basin of water (and increasingly, presumably, dribble) until they grabbed one of the submerged apples in their jaws.
Most of that doesn't seem to happen here, and instead you're meant to hand out gallons of sweets to marauding children dressed up as various horrors as they come round to your house. Except that doesn't happen here either - even though we live in a block of about sixty flats with plenty of children around, the place is always almost completely silent.
It doesn't stop us from making a small effort just in case, though - we carved a face out of a pumpkin a week ago (which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
whinknee gave a recessed eyepatch and then expected people not to think it was a pirate pumpkin, but everyone who saw it did, so that's what it was) and it sat on my desk for a week decaying slightly more by the day. By the 29th it was entirely full of cotton wool, so I scraped it all out with a rubber glove and then used hairspray on it in the hope it would preserve it and not instead cause it to spontaneously combust. And in an attempt to invite wandering three year olds to take some of the sweets that we have that neither of us like, I put the smelly artifact outside our door (though as we don't have a doorstep I had to create one out of a leftover flat-pack lamp box), where it glowed a bit and probably drove more people away than it attracted.
We did get two groups at the door, though, which is double the number from the last two years. Last year, I answered the door to a three year old while I was dressed in a hockey mask and a knife finger glove, which only served to scare the hell out of her. So I tried to tone it down this year and instead got an outrageously gigantic 80s metal wig that I'd got for $6 at the pharmacy, and answered the door with that and a Guitar Hero controller. This also scared the hell out of everyone, only more so. So after they'd gone I concluded the evening by taking a bag out and smashing the pumpkin into a small pile of putrid debris (as you do) to fit it into the bin. That was the most satisfying part of the whole day.
Most of that doesn't seem to happen here, and instead you're meant to hand out gallons of sweets to marauding children dressed up as various horrors as they come round to your house. Except that doesn't happen here either - even though we live in a block of about sixty flats with plenty of children around, the place is always almost completely silent.
It doesn't stop us from making a small effort just in case, though - we carved a face out of a pumpkin a week ago (which
whinknee gave a recessed eyepatch and then expected people not to think it was a pirate pumpkin, but everyone who saw it did, so that's what it was) and it sat on my desk for a week decaying slightly more by the day. By the 29th it was entirely full of cotton wool, so I scraped it all out with a rubber glove and then used hairspray on it in the hope it would preserve it and not instead cause it to spontaneously combust. And in an attempt to invite wandering three year olds to take some of the sweets that we have that neither of us like, I put the smelly artifact outside our door (though as we don't have a doorstep I had to create one out of a leftover flat-pack lamp box), where it glowed a bit and probably drove more people away than it attracted.We did get two groups at the door, though, which is double the number from the last two years. Last year, I answered the door to a three year old while I was dressed in a hockey mask and a knife finger glove, which only served to scare the hell out of her. So I tried to tone it down this year and instead got an outrageously gigantic 80s metal wig that I'd got for $6 at the pharmacy, and answered the door with that and a Guitar Hero controller. This also scared the hell out of everyone, only more so. So after they'd gone I concluded the evening by taking a bag out and smashing the pumpkin into a small pile of putrid debris (as you do) to fit it into the bin. That was the most satisfying part of the whole day.
