Highlights

In a few weeks, 2008 will come to an end and just like everyone else, I'll be looking back at the year gone by and taking stock--high points, low points, where to from here? It's all part of the yearly ritual that leads to the often ill fated New Year's resolution. I know I still have a month left to mull this all over, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say now that Halloween and Thanksgiving were two of my proudest moments of this year. The reason being, in both cases, I was able to successfully recreate an authentic American holiday experience for my children by sharing my traditions with my friends and neighbours.

Halloween and my neighbourhood trick-or-treating project taught me the overwhelming power of ONE. It's true what they say (whoever they is), one person really can make a difference. I was just a girl with a dream and a plan. Last year I put it on paper and handed it out to my neighbours with a small amount of success. This year I persevered, built on my idea and the payoff was huge. I truly felt that my children got to experience the same type of Halloween celebration that I did as a kid. It was probably as authentic as I'm going to get here in Australia. Not only have I been able to give that experience to my children, but that little pebble I chucked in the pond has sent ripples through the whole neighbourhood. Judging by the enthusiasm on the day, Halloween trick-or-treating is going to become an October tradition around here.

As for Thanksgiving, I think I finally nailed it. This year I was able to gather all the necessary ingredients, and single handed, prepare a truly traditional Thanksgiving feast for my family and friends. I must admit, I got a lot of inspiration from Pioneer Woman and the wonderful recipes she shares on her blog. (If you haven't visited her site, you must. She's truly a Wonder Woman) Recipes aside, I've cooked Thanksgiving dinner many times since I've lived here in Australia, but for some reason, this year's meal was probably the best. You might put this down to practice--I've done it enough times now that I should have a handle on it. Yes, that is true, but it's more than that. I think, like Halloween, it's the idea of introducing a tradition and watching as it's slowly embraced by the group you are introducing it to. The smiles on the faces of our guests (mostly Aussies) at yesterday's Thanksgiving celebration was all the thanks I needed.

I'm already looking forward to 2009 so I can watch these seeds I've planted continue to grow and flourish.

Halloween Haul

Thought some of y'all might be interested in seeing the haul of lollies my children collected during our neighbourhood trick-or-treat on Saturday. There were probably about 50 houses participating. We didn't make it to all of them, but we got to quite a few. As you will see in the photos, they collected plenty. So what types of lollies do Australians hand out on Halloween...see for yourself. There are a few surprises there!

This is my son's trick-or-treat bag sent to him by his American Grandma!

This is my son's lollie haul

Look closely, can you spot the candy cane? Interesting.

There were also some Halloween themed lollies which I was surprised to find in his bag. Didn't think such a thing would exist here. Learn something new all the time!

This is my daughter's lollie haul.

If you look closely, you will see a "Cars" themed goodies bag. This was full of all sorts of different lollies. A few houses handed out little bags of lollies like that. The bag is all that's left in my daughter's stash--she's eaten all the lollies that were inside of it.

My approach with Halloween lollies is to let the kids have a bit of it on the trick-or-treat day (basically as much as they can get into them before I take it away) and then I put the lollies away and dole them out each day. I generally only let them have one or two a day tops. I know, I'm mean like that!

Tonight as the Handsome Australian and I sat down with a warm cup of tea, I realised we had no biscuits (that's Aussie for cookies) left to go with our tea. It was then that I remembered the Halloween goodies and asked the Handsome Australian if he wanted to choose a treat from the trick-or-treat bags and he said, "No, I'm not really a fan of lollies." In his mind, lollies don't include anything of the chocolate variety. I had to explain to him that there was plenty of the chocolate variety in the bags and then he changed his mind. He robbed our oldest of a snack size Cherry Ripe Bar and a snack size Picnic Bar (neither of which I think exist in the USA). He then remarked, "I like the Halloween thing more and more each year."

Of course he does!

If you build it, they will come

As I've mentioned in my previous posts about Halloween, it's not something that is celebrated by the wider Australian public. There are pockets here in Melbourne where you might find some children trick-or-treating on Halloween, but it's remained a holiday that is seen as predominantly American and many people shun the idea for that reason. It's easy to understand in this global economy where McDonald's and Starbucks pop up everywhere, that Australians might be a bit sensitive about what they see as the Americanisation of their culture. I think this is the main reason that some Aussies seem to be so dead set against Halloween. That, and in my experience, it's not a holiday they completely understand and as such the fear keeps them away.

As an Expat, I've been torn between trying to hold onto my own traditions and trying to respect the desire of Australians to limit the American cultural invasion of their country. In my particular case, I'm in it for the long haul. My husband is Australian and we have thus far chosen to raise our children here in Australia. With the idea that my children may live out their entire childhood here in Australia, it's become all the more important to me that they learn about and celebrate the American traditions and customs that they are missing out on by growing up here.

Holidays like Thanksgiving are easier to create for them as it's a very personal holiday spent with family in your own home. It's about a good meal and being thankful. It's about being together. I can organise all of that.

A holiday like Halloween, however, is a bit more difficult to reproduce if you will. Anyone who's experienced the fun of Halloween knows that the great joy of it comes from wandering the streets in your costume, meeting friends and neighbours along the way and admiring their costumes and collecting a giant bag full of candy. To create an authentic Halloween experience for my children would involve the cooperation of an entire neighbourhood. How do you convince the skeptical and uninterested? Slowly, but surely. That's how.

With the support of my immediate neighbours, one of whom is an Irish Expat who also celebrates Halloween, I decided to organise a neighbourhood trick-or-treat last year. I made up a flyer explaining the ritual and history of Halloween, stressing the fact that it was an ancient ritual from the days of the Romans and Celts and I passed the flyer out to 3-4 neighbouring streets. After consulting my neighbours, they indicated it made more sense to do a trick-or-treat on a Saturday afternoon as more families would be at home and both parents would be around so one could hand out lollies and the other could take the kids around. So we chose a day and set a time and I included all this information on the flyer. I also included a small orange sign that read, "Trick or Treaters Welcome" with instructions for people who wished to participate to hang the signs on their front fences so the children would know which houses to go to. Then I crossed my fingers and waited to see what happened.

On the Saturday afternoon last year, I hit the streets with my children and to our delight, there were quite a few houses with orange signs. Looking for the orange signs actually added a new and fun dimension to the trick-or-treating as I knew it--it became more like a seek and find. The kids would try to see who could spot the next participating house first. The people in each house were genuinely happy to see the children in their costumes and of course the children were delighted with the lollies they were getting. It was fun watching our Aussie neighbours embrace the trick-or-treat ritual and in many cases, fumble their way through it. There may have been 20 houses out of about 150 that would have received the flyer that chose to participate. Not a bad result, just enough to make it worthwhile.

After the event, people talked as people do. Word got around the local Kindergarten and more and more people expressed interest in joining in the fun in the future. What a wonderful experience for the kids they'd say. Sounds like so much fun. Don't know why we don't celebrate it here. And so the comments went. So this year I decided I'd roll the dice again. I decided to increase the area of my flyer drop to include more neighbourhood families and subsequently create a larger event. I still included the streets from last year, but added some new ones. We stuck to the Saturday afternoon timetable but increased the time from 1 hour to 1.5 hours.

The result was amazing. This year there were probably somewhere near 50 houses participating and the numbers of kids on the street going house to house had increased two or three fold. Many people were participating for the first time and commented on the lovely atmosphere on the streets as neighbours greeted neighbours, in some cases for the very first time. The weather couldn't have been nicer as Melbourne served up a perfectly temperate afternoon. It wasn't too hot or too cold. It was just right.

As I watched my children run with enthusiasm from house to house and collect a lion's share of lollies I had a very special feeling. Here we are a world away from the dusty desert town of my youth, in a country that treats Halloween with nonchalance at best and in these most unusual circumstances, my children were experiencing an authentic Halloween. I'd done it. I built it, and they came. They actually came, and the smiles on their faces indicated they even enjoyed themselves. I can't wait for next year!

Halloween in Australia...

Halloween in Australia was extra special this year for more reasons that just finding proper orange pumpkins...I'll be back tomorrow to tell you all about it, but in the meantime I thought you'd enjoy seeing photos of Thelma and Louise in all their glory. They make a lovely pair don't they?

Enjoy!

And the winner is...

The Handsome Australian has carefully considered the entires into my Name My Pumpkins contest and he's chosen saretta's entry, "Thelma and Louise" as the winner. So the pumpkins have been officially christened with their new names and are awaiting their new looks...we'll get to the carving tomorrow.

Meet Thelma and Louise

Stay tuned for pics of the finished product!

Pumpkins, again...

Thanks to all those folks who've submitted comments on yesterday's post with suggestions for names for my two bouncy baby pumpkins. There is still time to leave your suggestions if you haven't already. So have a crack!

This morning I was speaking to my sister in the USA on the telephone. As a faithful reader of my blog, she knew about the Great Pumpkin Search and the resulting $18 pumpkins. I was trying to explain my momentary insanity for paying that much for pumpkins when she said this, "Well, for pumpkins that size, I think you'd probably pay about $10 or $12 for them at my church's pumpkin patch." I was really shocked by this. I just imagined that pumpkins in the USA would only cost $5 or $6 each. I don't know why, but there always seemed to be an abundance of them around when I was a kid and using the simple principles of supply and demand, it seems like an oversupply would equal a lower price. Of course here in Australia the supply is probably quite small and so the price is much, much higher...or so I thought.

After my sister gave me this news of $10 or $12 pumpkins in the USA, I decided I'd work that out using the current exchange rate (which heavily favours the US dollar). Here's what I found, a pumpkin that cost USD$10 would work out to be AUD$15.47 and a pumpkin that cost USD$12 would work out to be AUD$18.57. So if my sister's information is accurate, then perhaps I haven't been insane at all. If people in the USA are spending $12 on a pumpkin, that's the equivalent of my $18 pumpkin. I still think that is a lot to pay for a pumpkin, but I am feeling slightly better about it now.

If you are in the USA, how much did you pay for your pumpkin(s)this year? This is an extremely important question--I must know if I've been robbed or not! Help me if you can, tell me about your pumpkin purchases in the comments section.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got pumpkins to look after.

Name My Pumpkins

Even though I'm still recovering from paying $18 EACH for my Halloween pumpkins here in Melbourne, I am trying to look forward to the fun task of carving them into jack-o-lanterns. That's what my whole search was about right? Finding pumpkins to carve into jack-o-lanterns so I could share this Halloween tradition with my children. I can't help but feel like I've invested a lot in these pumpkins this year. Perhaps that's because I HAVE invested A LOT in these pumpkins--$36 to be exact. So I figure I've got to make the most of this precious commodity before it expires into a mouldy heap on my front doorstep. I need your help. I figure we should give these pumpkins names before we carve them up. I'm accepting your suggestions in the comments section of this post. I figure once the pumpkins are named, we'll have a better idea what direction we should go with the carving.

Now, so as not to confuse any of my readers, naming pumpkins in not a regular American tradition. Well, not one that I know of. We Americans don't normally name our Halloween pumpkins, but these pumpkins of mine, they aren't just your run of the mill pumpkins. My pumpkins are $18 pumpkins!!!! So to make myself feel better about the $18, I'm trying to convince myself that I didn't just purchase pumpkins, I also purchased the naming rights to the pumpkins. See, I'm value adding so it seems like I got a better deal. Very clever, I know.

So here's a photo so you know who you are naming:

Here's the other side of the pumpkins:

I know, I know, they look pretty special don't they? Well they are $18 pumpkins. It doesn't get more special than that does it? If it does, I don't think I want to know about it.

So hit me with your name suggestions. You've got until midnight PST Wednesday in the USA or until 6pm AEST Thursday in Australia. I'll let the Handsome Australian choose the winners from your suggestions. Then we'll see what kind of face we can put with a name when we carve the jack-o-lanterns.

Can't wait to see what everyone comes up with! Don't let me down!

The Great Pumpkin Search

When I first arrived here in Australia 8 years ago, there were very little signs of anything Halloween related. At the time, I wasn't that fussed about it. I always enjoyed Halloween as a child, but it wasn't something I missed terribly being away from the USA. Even so, I'd watch with interest each year as Australians would shun or shyly celebrate the holiday that most consider to have a clearly American connotation. This can be good or bad depending on who you ask. Nevertheless, I've watched Halloween slowly, ever so slowly, grow in popularity each year.

My personal interest in celebrating Halloween was rekindled about four years ago with the birth of my first child. I decided that although I am raising my children in Australia, I want them to understand the traditions of my youth and my home country. I didn't like the idea of visiting the USA one October when my kids were older and have them freaking out about the idea of Halloween. I could just hear them saying, "Mum, how could you have kept this from us? All these free lollies? Dressing up in cool costumes?". Or perhaps they wouldn't be upset at all, but I didn't want to take the chance. Halloween is for kids and I wanted my kids to enjoy it and experience it as much as they could living in Australia.

One of my favourite aspects of Halloween from my youth was the carving of the jack-o-lantern. I remember going to the grocery store with my Mom and helping her to pick out the pumpkin. We'd then take it home and keep it until a few days before Halloween. When the time came to carve it, my siblings and I would gather around the kitchen table and my Mom would ask us each to give design suggestions. We'd argue amongst ourselves whether that year's pumpkin should have a goofy expression or a scary one. Should it have eyebrows or teeth or be more simplistic? Once we'd settled on the design, one of us would draw it on the pumpkin and our Mom would carve it out for us. We'd often scoop the seeds out and put them in the oven to toast them to be enjoyed later.

For my daughter's first Halloween (she'd have been about 8 months old) I decided the best way to celebrate would be to carve a pumpkin and put up a few decorations around the house. We looked around for some of the orange pumpkins we use to make jack-o-lanterns in the USA, but could never find any. My brother-in-law brought us a Queensland Blue pumpkin that was the right shape, but the wrong colour. It has a grey like colour about it and the flesh of the pumpkin on the inside is very dense. Carving this thing was a nightmare. We needed an extremely sharp knife and plenty of muscle--the Handsome Australian struggled for quite awhile, but in the end he managed to conquer the beast. We stuck a candle in it and put it on our front door step. We had no trick-or-treaters that year and I'm not sure anyone even saw our jack-o-lantern and if they did they mightn't have known what it was for.

The following year, I found some proper orange pumpkins in a fruit and vegetable shop in the suburb of Bentleigh. Centre Road, Bentleigh used to be home to a Halloween trick-or-treat organised by an American Expatriate who was a local shop owner. So it made sense that this fruit and veg shop could sell these pumpkins. Hundreds of American Expats would turn up each year for the trick-or-treat and would pass through the fruit and veg shop and buy the pumpkins. We bought two of these pumpkins and brought them home. When it came time to carve them, I noticed each of them had a sticker that read, "Not to be consumed. For decorative purposes only." What? I mean I hadn't planned on consuming them, but I might have toasted the seeds. So I started wondering why exactly couldn't you consume them? In what type of environment had they been grown? Where did they even come from? I never got the answers to any of these questions, but I certainly didn't consume any of those pumpkins. They made good jack-o-lanterns though and more importantly, I knew where to source these pumpkins going forward.

Last year, I went back to visit this same fruit and veg shop in Bentleigh and was disappointed to find that they didn't have any of the orange pumpkins this year. I even asked at a few other fruit and veg shops and someone indicated that they usually do get some, but there were none around this year. So disappointing. So I was back to the Queensland Blue once again. I taught my neighbours how to carve pumpkins that year--I'm not sure they enjoyed it as much as they might have had we been able to source some of the orange pumpkins. Those Queensland Blues are really, really hard work.

This year, I was resigned to the fact that the Queensland Blue would be kicking my jack-o-lantern carving arse (that's Aussie for ass) once again. Then on Saturday, something miraculous happened. I walked into the large fruit and veg shop where I do my weekly shopping and along the back wall I saw them. Sitting on a shelf under a sign that read, Halloween Pumpkins, were four very healthy looking orange pumpkins. My little Expat heart skipped a beat! Wow! Real orange pumpkins where I least expected to find them. I raced straight to the back of the shop with the intention of grabbing two of them before anyone else could get their hands on them. You probably won't be surprised to hear that absolutely no one else in the store was vaguely interested in these pumpkins. My paranoia about missing out was needless. I had a quick study of the four pumpkins and chose the two that I felt had the nicest shape, the fewest marks or bumps and I marched right up to the till to pay. I did take a momentary glance at the price when I was choosing the pumpkins, "Halloween Pumpkins $4/kilo". These pumpkins are mostly hollow inside and so I thought they'd weigh maybe 2 kilos each or something. (Please note: estimating the weight of things has never been a strong point).

When I got to the till, the little display screen was out of order so I couldn't see how much each of my items was being scanned for. I didn't care though, I was riding the wave of euphoria that comes when you stumble upon a sought after item where you'd least expect it. The girl behind the till was keen to know how you actually carved the jack-o-lantern. She's asking questions and I'm giving her a quick "How to" as she tells me the total and I hand over my credit card. The woman in the queue behind me overhears our conversation and asks me curiously, "So what are those exactly?" I explain that they are pumpkins for Halloween. We use this sort in the USA to make our jack-o-lanterns. I can never find them here. I'm so excited to have found them today. She congratulates me on my find and wishes me a good Halloween. I sign the credit card slip, grab my pumpkins and walk out the door.

The Handsome Australian is at a neighbouring cafe taming the little people while I do the shopping. I walk into the cafe--one large pumpkin under each arm and a smile plastered on my face.

Me: "Have a look at what I found right now! Real Halloween pumpkins! They were just there along the back wall. I can't believe they had any. How lucky am I?"

HA: "Wow. Those are really big. They look good too. You're really pleased with yourself aren't you?"

Me: "I am. I'm just really excited."

HA: "How much were they?"

Me: (glancing at the docket for the first time, jaw dropping, sweat appearing on the brow) "Perhaps it's better if we don't discuss that."

HA: "Why? How much were they? 10 bucks each or something?"

Me: (quickly coming down off my high) "Uh, no. They were a bit more than that apparently."

HA: "What do you mean apparently? Didn't you see the sign before you bought them?"

Me: "I did, they were $4/kilo. I thought they'd be about 2 kilos a piece or something."

HA: "No way, these are huge. They are more like 4 or 5 kilos, which means..."

Me: "Yes, okay, yes. I just paid $18 EACH for these pumpkins. I'm insane. I know. I was just so excited."

HA: "That's okay. It's once a year. Who cares. If it makes you happy that's the important thing."

Yep, that's why I love him. He doesn't care that I just spent $36 on two vegetables that I intend on carving up and displaying on our doorstep until they begin to rot. He's a good man that Handsome Australian.