Hallowe'en Nights

It's not Halloween until Hallowe'en Nights. Dinner at Eagle Tavern, trick-or-treating throughout the park, hilarious and sometimes spooky enactments, and three fantastic story tellers. We've attended this event annually for three years now and have enjoyed it at least as much every time, if not more.

We start our evening in the Eagle Tavern with a home cooked meal, served family style to tables of about ten. Breads, chutneys, stuffing, beef pie, sausage, lemon herb chicken, tea, coffee, and pumpkin cake. It's a delicious way to start the night before we take off on our tour through the village.

This year the event grew by the measurements of one very delightful Sleepy Hollow. An extra turn around the pond in the village, by Ichabod's school house, through story at the Tarry Town Tavern, and past the party at the Van Tassels, fed our imaginations as we drew up to a fence where the Headless Horseman gave the poor pedagogue chase through the corn field. My favorite part.

Our wanderings took us through the yard of Dr. Frankenstein, too, where the villagers enjoyed our costumes while begging our help in stopping the crazed doctor from unleashing the monster into their presence. Another favorite stop, which came right after the snarky fortune teller and before the covered bridge. Spooky.

There are pirates, and singing pumpkins (Calvin's favorite part), and one more new thing this year: the plague doctor, and his best friend, the grave digger.

We always end our wanderings with a stop in the cafeteria for hot cider and a gander at what's filling our bags, and we end our night at the last presentation of Poe's Tell-tale Heart. It's told by one of the best true story tellers I've ever seen. Story telling at it's finest. And Halloween at our house just can't start until we've heard it.

Halloween field tripping

Homeschoolers can do field trips, too. This is an annual one for our group—a trip to what used to be a small, local pumpkin patch and apple orchard with a very scary haunted house but is now a very large fall fair. Putt putt golf, petting zoo, haunted hayride, corn maze, paint ball, AND pumpkins and apples in the fields. We get a doughnut and cider snack, too, of course.

And we didn't get lost in the corn maze.

Halloween

It was a wet one this year, but warm, and most of the kids in our neighborhood braved the weather joyfully. I'll take damp over freezing any day, but with all that drizzle, I left the camera at home this year.

Growing up, Halloween for me meant a homemade costume, usually one that made no pop-culture sense (one elementary year I turned myself into some kind of ghost princess thing that I still can't identify). It meant my parents taking the glass out of the top of our storm door to make giving out candy easier (if only our door did this, it would make things exponentially easier with dogs). It meant beef barley soup for dinner, simmering on the stove so that we could eat whenever we had the time or fancy. It meant visiting Mr. Long's house first in the evening, sometimes when it was still light out, to see just what he had up his sleeve, what fancy costume, what creepy decorations, for that year. We still talk about the year that he propped himself on the porch in a coffin and spooked the pants off all the kids that approached. We think I was the one who, after having been spooked, refused to go back up to get my candy. Sounds about right.

Every neighborhood had that house—the one with the spooky music and excessive decorations, the one that some kids rush towards while others approach more tentatively. In our neighborhood now, this house is a couple of streets away, and it never disappoints. This year's new addition to the maniacal menagerie was an evil vacuum cleaner. Who said humor couldn't be part of it? 

Carving

Oh the carnage! When I left for my meeting we still had pumpkins, but when I came home there jack-o-lanterns in their place, and guts everywhere.

Of course, much of that statement is categorically untrue. Obviously I was there at the beginning of the slaughter to take some pictures, and my wonderful husband would never have left pumpkin guts all over the house when the butchering was done, plus even after the dust cleared there was still one pumpkin left to be slain. But this was the first year that we just gave Calvin a pumpkin and said go. With a safety knife, of course. His pumpkin, below on the right, is an artistic rendering of the singing pumpkins we see annually at Hallowe'en Nights; note that he is singing a great Halloween song for you (laaaa!)

Pumpkin shopping