Frankenstorm

About this time last year we were looking at this map:

We ended up losing power for 'only' two days - we had friends who lost power for over a week!

Today we have this:

Here's hoping they're scaremongering, but knowledgeable people are taking it very seriously! I'm sure if we wanted to buy a generator we're too late already, but I'm heading out now to gas the car up, get some cash and do some (non-perishable) food shopping. 

Halloween Take 2

I can't imagine Guy Fawkes' night being postponed. The whole point is that it's on the 5th of November. The same with the 4th of July - the whole point is the date. But Halloween - apparently that can easily be rescheduled to a more convenient date.

We had a grand total of 3 trick-or-treaters last Monday after the snow storm. Our neighborhood was dark, but there were no power lines down as where we live they are actually all underground. We thought it might be fun to go trick-or-treating when it was so dark outside! However, it seemed that most people in our neighborhood had fled to places that still had heat and light and trick-or-treating was delayed townwide to November 5th. So here we are ready for Halloween all over again. After all, there is SOME candy left from last week - I haven't eaten it all yet (only the good stuff) and I might as well give the last of it away (as it's all the candies I don't like anyway) ;-)  Note to self: next year only buy candy you DON'T like!!

The Halloween snowmen have all melted, but the pumpkins and other decorations are still looking good. 

Happy snow-olleen!

WOW - they really weren't kidding when they predicted widespread power outages! We got about 12 inches of heavy wet snow. The branches in the first photo aren't usually that low - they were weighed down by the snow. (Everything below the word Trick  would normally not be there!)

Note the tree that's lying down on the left in the photo above - here it is again a few hours later:

We got off pretty lightly. The power was only out for 49 hours - there are thousands of homes that still don't have their power back yet - and the temperature in the house only dipped to 52˚F. We have city water rather than a well, so we did not lose our water too. We have a camping stove so we had hot food and drink. We have a chainsaw, so we did not have to wait for the city to come and remove the trees that had fallen and blocked the end of our road. About the only thing we don't have that would have been nice is smartphones. The reporting on the radio was useless in terms of letting us know what the situation was in the wider world and some internet access would have been nice!

I spent most of Sunday hand sewing DS's Halloween costume that I had been planning on finishing on the sewing machine. Then tonight we found out that trick-or-treating is postponed until next Saturday! In many neighborhoods it would not have been safe to go out trick-or-treating tonight because there are still downed powerlines. Even where there aren't, there are tree branches down all over the place. Most people seem to have cleared their driveways, but not necessarily the sidewalk.

It certainly has been a memorable Halloween!

Happy Snow-tober

Never mind a White Christmas - we're having a White Halloween this year! We're used to snow in the northeastern USA, but not this much this early!

With so many leaves still on the trees, this heavy wet snow is going to bring a lot of trees and therefore power lines down. At least it's the weekend, so we don't have to use a school 'snow day' so early in the year!

Fun with a sharp knife

Every Halloween we decorate our front step with carved pumpkins. When I say 'we', I really mean DH. I buy the pumpkins, but he's always the one that carves them. He does such a good job it has never occurred to me to help other than by helping to remove the guts from the pumpkins. I rarely even make suggestions about what the pumpkin face should look like, for fear of asking for something too difficult to execute.

Something got into me tonight though - guilt perhaps, that DH always does all the work carving the pumpkins? Or simply some enthusiasm for attacking something with a sharp knife? (It's been a long, busy, and stressful week!) DH was asking the children what kind of designs they would like on their pumpkins this year, and I decided to look for some inspiration online.  I found lots of pictures of spectacular pumpkins, but decided that for my first attempt at pumpkin carving perhaps I'd better stick to something simple.

After looking at some simpler designs though, I came to the conclusion that they were really rather boring. We have a neighbor across the street who puts out a dozen or so very nicely carved pumpkins every year, and I don't want to lower the standards in the neighborhood! Thinking I'd probably bitten off more than I could chew, I finally got started. DD gave me a felt pen, and I drew a rough outline of what I wanted. I'm really not a very artistic person, and I knew that the contours of the pumpkin were going to distort my image somewhat, so I really thought as I got started that the pumpkin was more likely to end up in the compost pile than back out on the front step.

After I got done, and went on to carve the design DD had drawn on her pumpkin, DH decided that the carving will be my job from now on. I'm thinking maybe we should have more pumpkins next year . . .

My owl

DD's spider

DH's ghost

DS's pumpkin

Halloween

Nappy Valley Girl's excellent blog post about Halloween has prompted me to write about it yet again, even though I wrote about it in 2006, 2007 and 2008!

The kids have been looking forward to Halloween for weeks now. The costume planning started back at the beginning of September. We live in a neighborhood that is a great place to go trick-or-treating. There are lots of kids around the same age as ours and they all like to get together and do the rounds of the houses together. This year they have been trying to coordinate their costumes on a theme. It's working, kind of. My two are going to be a hot dog and a bottle of ketchup. (One costume borrowed and the other bought at a tag sale.) The neighbors' kids are going to be containers of popcorn, candy, and 'a movie'.

It will be a two-day celebration this year as we have been invited to a friend's house on Friday for a 'pumpkin carving party'. (We get pumpkins a couple of weeks or more in advance and leave them out on the doorstep, but never carve them until a night or two before as they start to rot if the weather is warm.) Then on Saturday, one of the neighbors is hosting a party for the kids from 4 to 6, before they all go out trick-or-treating at 6.

Although we really enjoy Halloween, we keep it much lower key than many people. No inflatable lawn decorations for example!


Nor do I decorate the the house inside and out the way some people do. This year I did learn about a new tradition, which I'm wishing I'd heard of earlier because it's probably too late to implement it now. Apparently some people have their children leave the Halloween candy in front of the fireplace when they go to bed. Overnight a witch removes the candy and leaves gifts for the children instead. Of course, the witch must end up very fat from eating all the candy, and that would definitely be a bad thing, but I suppose she could take the candy to work to share. Or not.

Special days

In a recent blog post, Iota was commenting on the variety of festivals here in the US. I loved her comment about how the 'seasonal' aisles in the stores seem to exist in a time zone of their own. Christmas things are in the stores already and we haven't even had Halloween yet. In fact, in one store I was in this afternoon, there was a distinct lack of Halloween items, and what was there was already 50% off! I give it another week or so till the New Year's Eve decorations are on the shelves!

Iota noted the colours associated with various holidays here in the US:

Valentine’s Day: red and pink
St Patrick’s Day: green
Easter: yellow (and pastel shades generally)
Memorial Day and Fourth of July: red, white and blue
Hallowe’en: orange, black and purple
Christmas: green and red.

I'd add blue and silver for Hannukah and red, green and black for Kwanzaa and that the holidays each have specific shapes associated with them too:

Valentine’s Day: hearts
St Patrick’s Day: shamrocks
Easter: easter eggs, bunnies and chicks
Memorial Day and Fourth of July: stars and stripes (of course)
Hallowe’en: pumpkins and ghosts
Thanksgiving: turkeys
Hannukah: Menorahs and dreidels
Christmas: Christmas trees, holly and candy canes
Kwanzaa: kinara (candelabras)
Winter (if one is decorating for the season but avoiding specific holidays to be politically correct): snowmen and snowflakes

There are lots of other 'special days' that don't necessarily involve decorations that the kids learn about in school:

Arbor Day
Chinese New Year
Cinco de Mayo
Earth Day
Father's Day
Flag Day
Grandparents Day
Groundhog Day
Labor Day
Lincoln's Birthday
Mardi Gras
Martin Luther King Day
Mother's Day
Patriots Day
Presidents Day
Rosh Hashanah
Veteran's Day
Yom Kippur

Given the shortage of school holidays over here, they do help mark the passing of the year, even though most of them are not actually days off school. I would love to have the kids follow a 190 day English school year with regular holidays instead of the 180 days of school with most of the holidays in the summer. DD was horrified to hear that in the UK the kids are still in school till the middle of July or later. I bet she'd love to have a 2 week holiday at Christmas though! This year she'll be in school until 3 p.m. on December 23rd - what do you think of that, Auntie England?

What Halloween's about

When I was growing up in the UK, for the couple of weeks before the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes' (or Bonfire) Night", you could be fairly sure if that if there was a knock on the door in the early evening it would be kids dragging a scarecrow-like figure around with them and asking for a "penny for the Guy." Not 'guy' as in 'bloke' or 'man', but Guy Fawkes, the man who is infamous for being one of those who tried to blow up the houses of Parliament in the year 1605. The 'pennies' the kids were asking for were usually to buy fireworks for Bonfire Night. My siblings and I were never allowed to participate in this ritual. My parents bought the fireworks and certainly would not have approved of us begging for money in that way.

Over the years, because of safety concerns retailers have stopped selling individual fireworks and age restrictions have been introduced so that children can no longer buy them. The tradition of asking for money seems therefore to have carried over to the 'new' tradition in the UK of trick-or-treating. I've written here before about how in the 20+ years since I left the UK, Halloween has claimed a place in British culture and I bemoaned the homogenization of cultures. But wait - it seems the British have added their own small twist to the tradition of trick-or-treating. I had heard my mother mention it, but was not sure whether to believe her. Today I read on the BBC site about how

On Halloween in 1986, the House of Lords debated the "recently imported trick-or-treat custom of demanding money on threat of playing a nasty trick, now being used by youths to obtain money from old people and others.
Their lordships saw trick or treating not as a tradition, but as American for begging.

I get the impression that there are many who go out trick-or-treating in the UK prepared to 'trick' - throw eggs at cars or commit other acts of vandalism. I have never seen that happen here in the US. In some communities I've seen 'TP Night' celebrated the night before Halloween, when kids throw large quantities of toilet paper at trees, but I've never seen any really damaging vandalism. This year the kids here were particularly polite. Although some of the kids had pillow cases for their candy, none were particularly greedy, and almost all asked if we were offering them one candy or more than one. Even the older kids, though noisy as they moved from one house to the next, were unfailingly polite and had made an effort to dress up.

On National Public Radio this morning there was a report about how Halloween is the 4th most commercial 'holiday' in the US nowadays (the others being Christmas, the SuperBowl, and New Year!) It seems that one way or another, it's all about the money.

Candy stash

We dug out the plastic pumpkins last night for tonight's trick-or-treating, only to discover that they still contained candy from last year! I think the little ones had been eating their stash whenever they felt like it (i.e. right before meals, how dare they?!) so I had hidden the pumpkins away high on a shelf in the basement, fully intending to dole the candy out in small doses at what I considered to be appropriate times. Apparently there are no appropriate times for children to have candy in this house as, once I put the pumpkins away, I forgot that there was candy in them! (Not at all like me to forget that there's candy in the house though - wonder if I have some kind of memory problem?)

The Halloween candy survived the year well and is still edible. (DH and I snarfed some of it last night on the premise that we had to check if it was OK and we were doing the kids a favor by letting them have the fresh stuff tonight!) On reflection, I'm sure there must also be a bag somewhere that has some of last Easter's treats in it. Cadbury's creme eggs go mouldy over time* so I hope there aren't any of those hiding in the basement - that would be a serious waste :-(

* I know this because I have been known to hide them around the house so that I have a secret supply. Once I forgot I had hidden some in a particular cupboard. When I finally rediscovered them I was sorely disappointed (after my initial excitement) because, although the chocolate was fine, the filling had gone mouldy. Even before they reach that stage, the filling can get rather dry and is not so yummy. Moral - eat your treats sooner rather than later!