Have I mentioned here that I didn’t grow up doing Halloween? Even when it was mentioned, or maybe some friends were dressing up for it, Halloween was very much a We Don’t Do That Here type of thing. In my family, it was very much frowned upon. Too American. Too much magic for a church family.

I still don’t feel that I DO Halloween.

And yet…

My girls each had Halloween items every day in their lunchboxes. We did haunted house hands (found on Pinterest – the inspiration was @arttok.w ). We had themed food: mummy sausage rolls, mummy puff pastry pizzas, ghost strawberries (looking more like startled show girls tbh), themed cut-out sandwiches, decorated cookies, boo-nanas, Biscoff jack-o-lantern chocolates. S, and occasionally E, still pronounce “ghosts” with two syllables: ghost-es. S argued with me fiercely about my promise to provide “ghost pops with little ghost-es”, which apparently I had promised and not delivered on, all as she was delighting in eating more boo-nanas than I expected her to eat, having stuck a fruit stick into the banana end and eating them like lollipops.

We made tin can lanterns. This was a craft I had actually tried years ago (like, uh, definitely more than 15 years ago), and decided it was too hard to be worth it. But this year, I thought maybe… so I took up freezer space for about five days too long, and then had a go. I was not overly successful in achieving my vision, but C wanted a go, and as it turns out, she was really quite good at it. She made the majority of all the lanterns. Unfortunately, she was all enthusiastic about seeing the effect and let the ice melt too soon, so there was a bit of trying to fix things up. E draped hers in her special crochet blanket at bedtime for a beautiful effect, and S insisted she needed five tea lights in hers to keep away anything scary. Thank goodness I had stocked up on tea lights.

We watched Halloween movies. And look. While I’m here. Netflix. GRRR. In the last few weeks, we had watched both Hotel Transylvania and Hotel Transylvania 2. Girls had decided that Hotel Transylvania 3 was THE movie to watch on actual Halloween. Yet, Netflix had for some reason removed both 2 and 3 this week. I am very cross about this. We watched The Addams Family instead, so it wasn’t an entire flop, but C was very much NOT enthusiastic about this for the first five minutes or so.

We did not decorate. We did not dress up. We most definitely did not go trick or treating. We did not carve any pumpkins or pineapples or watermelons, mostly because I forgot to order an appropriate food to practice my knife skills on while simultaneously refusing to let young children near even when they have promised to be super duper careful and really probably won’t hurt themselves.

Next year, I predict, will be different. Much more Halloweeny. Still no trick or treating, unless we have unexpectedly moved to a family housey neighbourhood. Definitely costumes. Hopefully more themed decorations. Likely, still the same level of scare in the movie selections. Addams Family was right on the cusp of tolerable for S. Friday night was Monsters Inc which had them all scream-laughing, and as E was snuggling down to sleep tonight, she was telling me very sleepily about it and how funny it is that monsters are so scared of a sock that they will turn it to dust, and she drifted off to sleep with a smile on her face, knowing that monsters are actually scared of kids.