Happy Halloween

We are back from tromping through the rain and mist with some friends in what is the closest that most of our children will get to participating in a true harvest festival--the "trick or treat" tradition of Halloween.   My son's goodie bag is sufficiently loaded with loot that it will probably take him a week or more to eat it all or to decide to dispose of it.

So the weather wasn't the most cooperative this year, since it was rainy and cold tonight.  Something that did warm my heart, though, was the Doodle that Google displayed on its home page today.

Google had a time-lapse video of some staff carving GIGANTIC (I think they were half-ton) pumpkins into what eventually became a Google logo.  But in between carving, various other staff came and hung out, sometimes in costume.  You can watch the video below:



It is a cute, creative, and original tribute to this autumnal holiday, and one that you can enjoy without any calories, which is rare this time of year. It also adds to the impression that it must be a real kick to work at Google (for more on that, see this post).

For even more fun, you can watch this video in which the pumpkin artists explain their process and what it is like to carve a half-ton pumpkin:


Happy Halloween 2011 to all!

A Howling Halloween in Downtown Cary

The Town of Cary, NC, where we live, has a major push on to re-invigorate the old downtown area, which is walking distance from our house.  One of the components in this campaign were some brand-new activities for children to celebrate Halloween.  They took place this evening, so my son and I walked down to check them out.

The fun started at the Herb Young Community Center, where they had pumpkin painting crafts in one room, and the entire gym area covered with games and bouncy houses for younger children.

They were also running a hayride from the Community Center up Academy Street to the new Cary Arts Center, about which I have written before.

The horses were beautiful, but this picture doesn't do them justice.

Note to the Town of Cary:  I think the hayride is a much better idea than the horse-drawn carriages you have been running at Christmas.  The Christmas idea is great, but the carriages are so small that they only hold a few families at a time, and the waiting time just gets to be too long.  The hayride can hold a lot more people, so the lines aren't too bad.

One brand-new feature this year was that some of the merchants in the downtown area stayed open for Trick and Treating--plus, many handed out special discount coupons as an incentive for the adults to buy something in the shops.
Note to the merchants:  A lot of children these days have nuts and peanut allergies.  So it is not a good idea to have a candy selection in which everything has nuts, which was the case in a couple of the places we went.

This was the day after Final Friday, so half of the studios didn't participate, which was a shame, because the owners all know my son and we wanted to show them his costume.  But the most happening place in the whole downtown shopping area was Chambers Art, a multi-faceted artistic facility that not only gave away candy, but had a wonderful Halloween village display and was even running a craft activity for children to do:

Chambers Arts really got into the spirit of the holiday, and Klara's Czechoslovakian restaurant had an appropriate outfit on its candy dispenser:

After stopping off at Ashworth's Village (where the downtown merchants are), the hayride continued up to the Cary Arts Center, which had all sorts of things going on.

There were classes where families carved clay pumpkins, blue grass music, scary (or not) Halloween stories, and even a Haunted House!

All in all, it was a fun evening of Halloween activities in Old Cary.  To be honest, most of them were geared to the younger-than-middle-school crowd.   The stuff at the Art Center was more for all ages, though, and it was nice, crisp evening to be walking around and enjoying the sights and the great holiday energy.

A Literary Halloween

In our house, Halloween is all about the costume.  Ever since my son's first Halloween, when we bought him a little outfit from a local Indian store, made him a turban out of gauze stuck together with hot glue with a big fake jewel in the center, and put him in the baby backpack on the back of my husband, who was dressed in gray sweats and a spray-painted-grey Freddy Kruger mask (I think) with a gray tube hot-glued on to make the trunk of the elephant that was carrying our minature majaraja, we have always made a big deal out of our home-made costumes.

This year, my son picked a character from his favorite book from the summer reading program I described in a previous post.  First, I'll give you the passage that introduces his costume character:

He was the largest man Milo had ever seen, with a great stomach, large piercing eyes, a gray beard that reached to his waist, and a silver signet ring on the little finger of his left hand.  He also wore a small crown and a robe with the letters of the alphabet beautifully embroidered all over it.

That description comes from the classic 1961 book, The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster.  My son loves that book, because it has a lot of puns and turns of phrases, and reminds him a bit of another of his favorites, Alice in Wonderland (he went as The Mad Hatter several years ago before Johnny Depp made the Mad Hatter cool again).

The costume, as usual, took more time that I had expected, due in part to my son's exacting demands for accuracy (I, for example, just planned to write letters on his robe with a Sharpie, but that was rejected out of hand, since the text said the letters were EMBROIDERED).  But, in the end, I think it looked pretty good.

Here is the end result:

I hope everyone else's Halloween was as fun and as creative as ours was!