Hallowe’en – a festival of two pies

It seems to me that Hallowe’en is something of a medley. It’s a mixture of the ghoulish and the twee, anything orange or black is at liberty to make an entrance, and something a bit reminiscent of harvest festival has got involved too. I’m not quite sure what you are wishing someone when you say “Happy Hallowe’en”, but it’s a rather jolly sort of thing, I’m sure. The Americans have done a better job of forgetting the darker side of the origins than we have.

Centre stage is the Pumpkin. The Pumpkin (as well as being a splendid word made up of a most appealing selection of consonants) provides an excuse to visit the pumpkin patch. The pumpkin patch is a small field, with a very very much larger field attached, full of a large number of children’s activities. There are a couple of mazes, a fort made out of hay bales, a tricycle track, water pumps set up to race plastic ducks down lengths of guttering, tractor and trailer rides, and various agriculturally-themed pieces of play equipment. I thoroughly enjoyed the pumpkin patch. I went twice: one visit with preschool, and one week-end visit with the family. You get to pick your pumpkin, and I had fondly anticipated this would involve a sharp knife and a living demonstration to my 21st century city-dwelling children that fruit grows on a vine (ha! I bet you thought the pumpkin was a vegetable). Actually, it involved a trip to the small field in an orange trailer pulled by an orange tractor, where the pumpkins had been laid out on the bare ground. We got to pick our pumpkins as in “pick out” or “select”, not as in “pluck from the vine”.

I do feel that there should be some story about the pumpkin patch. There should be some character, like the tooth fairy, or the Easter bunny, or Santa. Hallowe’en needs a character and a story. How about this? Peter Pimply Pumpkin, the wicked pumpkin elf who cuts off the toes of children who don’t go to bed early. His brother Jack Jolly Pumpkin was a good elf, who fought Peter and banished him from the land, making it safe for children to dangle their feet over the side of the bed once more. That is why children make jack o’lanterns, to remind them of the importance of going to bed when their parents tell them. You should all tell this story, so that in a few years’ time it has become a Hallowe’en legend. I’ll tell you why. If you don’t, the character who is hovering in the wings, ready to become a Hallowe’en character is Tigger from Winnie the Pooh. Orange and black, you see. I can’t tell you the number of gratuitous Tiggers I saw last week – they’re everywhere. So come on. Start passing on the legend of Peter Pimply Pumpkin, or Tigger will win the day, and bouncing around vacuously will become the message of the Hallowe’en season. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

The best thing about the pumpkin patch by far was the pumpkin cannon. It was a dollar a shot, but worth every cent. I have no idea quite what the contraption was, but once charged, it could fire a pumpkin into the sky, to the height of two electricity pylons one on top of the other (there was a handy pylon just by, and I visualized another one on the top of it). That is a very great height for a pumpkin, and when it speeds down, it hits the ground with a very satisfying “thud” and splatters in all directions. I can’t explain why any thinking adult would derive pleasure from this procedure, but I tell you, if it had been free instead of a dollar a shot, I’d have been there all week-end.

As an aside here, I should tell you, dear Bloggy Friends, that, knowing your attention to detail and desire for accuracy, I had a discussion with Husband in which we tried to estimate the height reached by the pumpkins. My usual method of estimating height, ie imagining men 6’ tall standing on each other’s shoulders, wasn’t up to the job, but I wasn’t persuaded by Husband’s either. He uses a cricket wicket (22 yards) as his standard, and although he maintained that he could easily imagine a stack of vertical cricket wickets stretching up into the air, I wasn’t convinced. I decided that “the height of two electricity pylons” would have to do. The really big ones, by the way.

The other great tradition of Hallowe’en is, of course, trick or treating. For this your children need costumes. For at least two weeks before Hallowe’en, people ask you “have you got your costumes yet?” in the way that from December 1st onwards, you are asked “are you all organized for Christmas yet?” My children were becostumed as follows: 3-yo was a butterfly (pink top and pink tights with pink swimming costume over both, wings, home-made antennae, much prancing about), 6-yo was Spiderman in a much-loved much-worn black Spiderman costume (black and therefore ideal for Hallowe’en), and 10-yo was a rather reluctant ghost, in an old clerical surplice underneath a Woolworth’s ghost outfit designed for someone half his age which only just covered his head, shoulders and chest (hence the need for the surplice underneath).

We’d been invited to a party, which was very nice, since Husband had to be at work, and it felt rather jollier to be in company than setting out on our own. The trick or treating was all very friendly and fun, and it’s easy to see why Americans have happy Hallowe’en childhood memories rivaling those of Christmas. There was one house which we didn’t go to, as it was done out as a haunted house, and freaked out Spiderman and the butterfly. It had a skeleton hanging outside, bats at the windows, and eerie music playing, interrupted by the occasional screech or cackle.

Having got the hang of it all, when we returned home from the party, the children were keen to try trick or treating in our own neighborhood, so we went out again. By this time, we were pretty good at sniffing out the best houses (this isn’t hard – you just go to the ones where the porch light is on, and where there are Hallowe’en decorations). The ghost could have flitted from house to house all evening, filling his bag with more and more candy, but Spiderman started complaining of the cold (great power, great responsibility, not enough body fat), and the butterfly’s legs got tired (surprisingly heavy to carry, is a butterfly), so we returned home before too long. While I put the butterfly to bed, the ghost and Spiderman finished the evening on our porch bench (I have to say bench, not glider, as my British readers wouldn’t cope with the visual image of a glider on our front porch, but it is a glider, if you’re interested, my $25 bargain from an estate sale). I lit them a candle or two for effect, and wrapped them in rugs, and they had a fine time handing out candy to other children. I think they almost enjoyed it more than collecting.

So why a festival of two pies? Well, pumpkin pie first, totally delicious, and distinctively American and autumnal. Next, humble pie. You see, there I was, all ready to denounce Hallowe’en as just another cooked up opportunity for retailers to make a quick buck, more evidence of the materialism we are so quick to accuse America of, and an unavoidable adversary in the maternal battle against unhealthy eating. But actually, it was great fun. Good clean fun. Sure, you could go out and buy fancy costumes if you wanted, but no-one minded if you didn’t. Sure, you could spend what you liked on all kinds of decoration and other Hallowe’en tat, but you didn’t have to. (I came across my favourite example while looking for a present for a friend’s new baby: Hallowe’en scratch mitts, orange with a black jack o’lantern face on the back.)

Of course it’s a problem knowing how to process so much candy, but I wasn’t, as I had feared, a lone voice in worrying about this. 10-yo’s teacher suggested to his class that they should consider collecting money for UNICEF instead of (or as well as) candy. This struck me as a good development in the Hallowe’en tradition. When I was brave enough to express my feelings that the candy was a problem, rather than a marvelous free gift, I found other mothers agreed. In a society where obesity is the biggest health problem (and that’s a blog post which I haven’t been quite brave enough to write yet), it did feel uncomfortable to send children out to get a huge amount of free candy, but I was pleased to discover I wasn't the only witch of a mother who felt that way. My kids amassed 140 items, which, if I rationed it out at a piece per child per day, would last for over six weeks. I decided against this approach – why start a habit now that I’ve carefully avoided for years? I decided on a week-end of gluttony, with that terribly misguided adult hope that they would get so sick of the candy, they would be pleased to see the stuff taken away. We got through about half of it. Anything sampled and left to one side, any packet opened and not finished, any lolly licked and forgotten, it all found its way to the trash. No saving for later, no sharing around. The nicer bits of chocolate got diverted into a secret parents-only stash for future use. Some of it I’m keeping back for our trip to San Diego next week. Some of it I took, after discussion with the children, to a project which gives food to homeless people. Please, before you get all cross with me and ask me why I think homeless people benefit from sugar and artificial coloring any more than my own kids, you should know that the candy never made it that far. (I try not to lie to my children, but I am not above occasionally resorting to a very careful choice of words. I can't remember exactly how I phrased it, but it was technically truthful, and in my defence, I plead that I have their interests at heart.)

So while you were singing Harvest Festival songs and teaching your children to be grateful for the produce of the land, I was finding ways of sneaking candy into the trash. My generation was brought up to think of wasting food as a crime, and for most of us it goes against the grain not to finish up every mouthful on the plate, but times have changed, and I was merely applying the old Harvest lesson of making the best use of the resources I had. Best use is a flexible term.