Last night Jen and I threw a Hallowe'en party for our housemates. Hallowe'en is not a big deal here at all, so we figured it was our duty as Canadians to share the culture of the North American Hallowe'en traditions.In some ways, this proved to be quite a challenge. Although Hallowe'en decorations and costumes are on sale here, it's certainly not like what we'd find back home, with whole stores given over to spooky and scary items. We had to hunt pretty hard to find what we wanted - spider webs, streamers, and hardest of all, pumpkins! I keep forgetting it's spring here; and of course, pumpkins really are a fall fruit. We went into one fruit store where we found pumpkins, but they were pale orange or even white and looked... well... anemic. They were also selling for $1.99/kilo, so when we worked it out, that meant an average sized jack-o-lantern pumpkin was going to cost us something stupid like $18! At another store, we found actual orange pumpkins, being marketed this time as "Hallowe'en pumpkins", and they came in a see-through plastic bag with a jack-o-lantern face already on it (presumably for you to use as a guide if you wanted to carve your own pumpkin). They were selling for $20 each! No thank you. In the end we bought five little gourds and used them to make little mini jack-o-lanterns, and they were quite cute!
The next challenge was the food. We'd agreed with our housemates that everyone would contribute some food to the party, and Jen and I had planned to do some 'fear factor' type dishes. We made worms and dirt, a kitty litter cake, and severed fingers made out of hot dogs and potato chips. We also made a blood-red punch and cooled it off with ice in the shape of severed hands, courtesy of some of Jen's first-aid gloves which we had earlier filled with water and frozen. We weren't able to make everything we wanted, though. For example, the kitty litter cake recipe requires tootsie rolls, which aren't available here. And Jen has a recipe for a really gross jello dessert made with lemon jello and mini Oh Henry bars. (See if you can work out what THOSE are supposed to be!) Unfortunately, there are no Oh Henry bars here, nor any other chocolate bar that would make a good stand-in, so we had to give that one a pass.
We decorated the house with the usual cobwebs and fake spiders. We created dead body outlines on the floor and used red lipstick to write spooky messages on the glass walls and mirrors in our entranceway. We also had a great big enormous spider that we were supposed to hang from the ceiling, but we couldn't figure out how to hang it. We took lots of pictures and I can't post them all here, so you can go to my "Melbourne" album in Facebook to see the whole collection.
We also introduced our guests to some traditional Hallowe'en games. I wasn't entirely too sure how these would work out, since we're all adults and all. Not all of my housemates work with kids for a living, so I wasn't sure how they were going to react to kids games. But everyone seemed to have a great time! We ate donuts hanging off strings from the clothesline, mummified two people, and carved jack-o-lanterns. Jen entertained with spooky stories and we ate roasted pumpkin (well, gourd) seeds. So all in all, a great evening!
This morning we woke up to HOWLING winds (as in, "Auntie Em, Auntie Em, there's no place like home!") and don't really feel like going outside until we really need to. So instead, we're gonna watch a movie and just basically laze around.
The only other thing of note is that Australia has now moved out of daylight savings time - so it is now a 15 hour difference between here and home. And in a week, when North America moves into daylight savings time, it'll be a 16 hour difference - and making phone calls is going to become an interesting challenge!
