Pre-Halloween Craft Party

On the weekend I had some friends over for an afternoon of Halloween cupcake-decorating and pumpkin painting (and an excuse for more gross punch) and an All Hallow's Read Secret Skeleton.

Having tested some cupcake designs earlier, I decided the best ones were the Owls and the Creepy-Crawlies, so I got the stuff for those and we started with those. Then we improvised, with extra help from a bag of lolly facial features.

First up, here's the punch. Another round of frog spawn punch...

...and a second go at eyeball punch. The colour wasn't as good on this eyeball one because I mixed in some juices and soft drinks with a less vibrant colour.

Then later the colour leached out of the black jelly at the bottom and turned it all disgusting. Plus the eyeballs were starting to disintegrate.

Secret Skeleton was fun. We had struggled with knowing appropriate age books for kids, but it seemed to go ok.

Then we started on the cupcakes. Owls and creepy-crawlies (including chocolate-coated sultana ants)

Then the moustaches and mouths came out!

Oh no! I ate a bug!

Early Christmas Special - Demon Rudolph.

And with the most mutated mouth award, demon zombie panda.

I wanted to try painting on pumpkins this year for a few reasons. One, as I mentioned in my introduction to this year's Halloween series, is having no desire to set fire to anything in my house. Also it isn't dark when trick-or-treaters come. Also, good carving pumpkins are not easy to get or cheap here. I carved a Queensland blue once and it was very hard physical labour. So I picked a pumpkin I like to eat, and we painted instead.

Can't wait to eat some pumpkin.

I blatantly copied mine from the colouring-in sheets I'd printed for the kids.

What a fun Halloween-y day! Although I think we all had severe sugar crashes.

Re-Designing My Halloween

In case you can't tell, I'm a lorikeet.

I spent about 5 years of my childhood in America and I loved Halloween. I loved dressing up (and still do). I loved the slightly-creepy-but-not-too-scary-really decorations, sound effects, music, costumes and TV shows. I loved all the icons of Halloween: jack-o-lanterns, bats, black cats, ghosts and so forth. I love the colour schemes of black, orange, green and purple. When we moved to England and later Australia, Halloween was not so much celebrated, although I certainly enforced it on my friends and we did our best to celebrate anyway, just the way I had as a child.

Rhiannon and I in America. My candy bucket said "Honey".

This year, when I started thinking about it again, having just read “Cradle-to-cradle” I thought that maybe it was time to take a new look at my old traditions.

There’s a lot of resistance to Halloween in Australia because we seem to hate just blindly following in  America’s footsteps. But it’s hardly a tradition that started in America so that argument always irritates me. Regardless, Halloween is growing in Australia, so maybe we should think about how we want to do it. This is how I want to do it.

What to Keep:

• I want a holiday occasion that celebrates the creepy and spooky. I’m not into seriously scary, but I love slightly scary. That feeling you get when you rationally know that you are safe but inside you just aren’t sure.
• I want the fun decorations and awesome cute foods that come out of any themed event.
• Personally I also enjoy the option of costuming, but I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and I don’t think it’s necessary to the holiday. So I'm keeping this as a 'maybe'.

A "maybe" for everyone else, that is.

What to Add:

• Ethical choices, particularly with regard to waste. Let these activities, decorations, foods etc. be thoughtfully chosen to avoid adding to landfill.
• A celebration of local culture, environment and history. Let’s use the resources we have – foods that are seasonal to us at this time of year, stories that relate to our own world and our own local history.

What to Avoid:

• As mentioned, landfill. Cheap plastic products that we will either throw out or store to use only once a year. Much as I ADORE these things in a way, I know they are bad.
• A focus on sugar. We are an obese nation, and we eat too much unhealthy food. It’s still a celebration and there’s no reason not to have party food but we don’t need to hoard and obsess over it. I guess I mean this mostly in relation to kids. The trick-or-treating candy overload seems like a bad idea.
• Unattended fire. Again, I love jack-o-lanterns, but this is an obviously bad choice for Australia. For that matter, when young kids trick-or-treat here, it is still light!

Sorry terrible childhood pumpkins, you just aren't right for me anymore

Over the rest of the month, I'm going to explore some of these ideas further and highlight some Halloween foods and crafts that can fit into this model in some way.

To start with, if you haven't read my previous posts about these pumpkins, they were a nice way of using up an old tea towel and gaining some decorations.