Cats and Pumpkins at Halloween – 2012

Shadows of a thousand years rise again unseen,
Voices whisper in the trees, “Tonight is Halloween!”
– Dexter Kozen –

At night, if I don’t rein in my imagination, the walk from the road to The Red House is spooky. It is a long winding driveway, lined with tall dark spruce trees and just beyond are thick woods where all the wild animals lie in wait. When I was a kid, I would not have ventured up this driveway on Halloween – unless I knew with absolute certainty that the treats at the door were worth being that scared. It is a forbidding stroll at night.

We haven’t had a trick or treater at our door for a long time. There used to be a few children on our rural road, but they have long since grown up. I still decorate for Halloween anyhow and we still buy a few treats just in case. And I will likely walk down to the end of our driveway and back, just to get the adrenalin going. Nothing like a wee bit of fear to take me back to the Halloweens of my youth!

We recently spent a few days with dear friends who have a new kitten. (There is no better kitten than one that belongs to someone else – all the benefits, and no responsibility.)

Word association: ask your mind to remember kitten – cat – Halloween – pumpkin.

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When we weren’t playing with the kitten, or wandering around the farm, or talking or laughing or watching the first season of ‘Castle’ on DVD, we carved Halloween pumpkins. This was my pumpkin. Can you figure out what it is? It would be best if you told your brain it isn’t a face with one big round eye. If you fixate on that idea, you will never see anything else. Really.

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Here are our pumpkins at night. The one on the far left is mine from the photo above. Now can you see what it is?

The one on the right is our hosts. He did the carving with various size drill bits – trust a man to come up with a way to use a power tool.

The pumpkin in the centre is what happened when I took up the drill and three sizes of bits – and no plan at all. Don’t try to see anything in this pumpkin – it is simply the result of not knowing when to quit.

There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people: religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin.
– Linus Van Pelt in “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” – by Charles Schulz –

So starts my other post about Halloween. It was called Pumpkin Face.  You wouldn’t know it from the quotation, but in this post I talk about how Halloween has fallen victim to political correctness and a process similar to homoginization. There is also a photo of the pumpkin my grand daughter carved – the face is one Charlie Brown could relate to.

Last, but not least: I used the WordPress Theme called ‘Monster’ for a few days during Halloween. This is what it looked like: