Blogtober Day 31: My Favourite Halloween Tradition
Oh my goodness I did it! The final day of Blogtober and here I am!! When I started this I really didn’t think I’d make it to the end. My track record with things you have to do everyday is not great. I’ve never quite managed to complete a fitness challenge, for instance. But I did complete this! A whole world of things now feel possible! Maybe I will embark on a fitness challenge again. I do need to get back into yoga, my wretched body has been stiff lately.
Since the final day of Blogtober falls on Halloween, I will be talking about my favourite Halloween tradition. There are a lot of really awesome things about Halloween, like dressing up, having parties, scary films, food…. but my favourite has to be pumpkins.
Carving pumpkins is one of my favourite things, even though it incorporates many of my less favourite things, like mess and being sticky. I actually quite like getting my hand into the squelchy innards and pulling it all out. I’m not so keep on sorting through it all to get the seeds out, but waste not want not!
I love carving pumpkins so much because it’s such a group activity. For the past few years we’ve had friends round to carve our pumpkins, and now we live together it’s a great activity to bring us all into one room.
To keep it clean and as un-stressful as possible we lay out a bin bag and work on that, with bowls for throwing the innards into. We have a compost bin so it all ends up on there afterwards, aside from the seeds which we roast later on. Usually there will be a spooky film on the telly, and we’ll have some kind of autumnal beverage – this year we were going to have mulled wine but we drank that yesterday!
When we’re done we always end up with quite a selection of carvings, which we illuminate with candles. It’s nice because there are five of us, we end up with at least five pumpkins to decorate the house!
I also love cooking with pumpkin. When we went to the pumpkin patch to choose our guys, I ended up with four! One of them was an extra big lad so I could use him in many dishes. I’ve already made a pumpkin tart and pumpkin chutney with him, and I’m not even close to halfway through! I have got a whole load of recipes I want to try this Halloween, and many contain pumpkin, so hopefully I won’t be throwing any on the compost. If it starts going a bit off I suppose I can freeze some or make more chutney.
In writing this I’ve realised I’m kind of over Halloween parties. We used to do big parties where everyone dressed up, but I’m not too fussed on getting drunk anymore, and the clean up is a lot of work. Gosh I sound old! My friend hosts a Halloween extravaganza every year anyway, which is many hours of spooky films and eating. Much more up my street! Maybe I can make some kind of pumpkin snack to take along!
What are your favourite Halloween traditions?
Congratulations on getting to your last day of blogtober!! Now for blogmas, amirite? Hahaha 🙂
I don’t know if I could handle Blogmas! Though I didn’t think I could handle Blogtober, so we shall see!
Congratulations on doing blogtober, it takes me so long to do one post (even a short one) so don’t know I could post everyday! I love pumpkins although I don’t think I’ve ever actually carved one out myself!! I need to change that 🙂