Pumpkins

Way back in October, for a bit of family-rated Halloween fun, we had Kids # 1 #2 around to carve jack-o'lanterns. It was the first time carving for both of them. Halloween is a relatively new import to Chile. Children's costume parties and lots of candy are definitely a thing, but the less candy-conscious elements of the holiday haven't arrived yet. This year, however, for the two weeks before Halloween, the Jumbo Supermarket chain was selling big orange American pumpkins.
            Over in the candy section of the supermarket, hunting through Haribo mixed assortments for the ones with lots of licorice, I became aware of a sotto-voce conversation behind me.
            "You ask."
            "No, you ask."
            "Are you supposed to eat them?"
            "How would I know?"
            "Ask her, then."
            "You ask!"
            I turned around. Behind me, a family of four were bending over my cart prodding bemusedly at the pumpkins.
            "You want to know what the pumpkins are for?" (A dim reply, but one has to break into a conversation somehow.)
            "They're all over the supermarket!"
            I explained.  With a google-image search even, and they thought it was pretty neat.  They thought it might be better done in autumn, the way the north-Americans did it, but the candle part sounded lovely. Last I saw of them, they were making a straight line for a big stack of pumpkins in the fruit-and-veg department.

            I hope they have as much fun as we did.  Kid #1 is 9 now, and taking life very seriously indeed.  All afternoon, she diligently scraped and drew and carved, but it was Kid #2 (age 6)  who really grasped the possibilities.
            He put the top of the pumpkin on his head and wore it as a hat, and offered it to his sister who thought it was disgusting- "There-is-nobody-as-gross as-you-anywhere! On the whole planet."
            So he dipped his hands into the big bowl of orange pumpkin guts, he came up dripping. "Raaarrrggghhhh!"
            His sister scooted back from the table and yelled.
            "Get away from me! You get away from me right now!  Mom - make him go away! He are so disgusting, take it away!"
            Looking thoughtful, Kid #2 wiped the worst of it on the seat of his trousers, and with an air of innocence that would do credit to a baby rabbit, he turned to his sister and held out a hand.
          "Shake?"
            This time, she made it halfway across the room. "Make him stop make him stop I can't bear it make him go away why is he even here I can't work like this take it away take it away take it away!
           "Kid #2 lifted his face up to mine.  He was suffused with happiness - there was so much of it that it was almost too much. He kicked a chair leg to relieve his feelings and crawled under the table and sat there for a while, sighing deeply.

Stickiness and screaming aside, both Kids #1 and #2 reckoned that carving pumpkins was pretty good fun, but it was when we added candles that the afternoon reached it apotheosis.
            In the bedroom, we closed the door and drew the blackout curtains. I lit two tea lights and lowered them into the pumpkins - 
            and magic happened.
           A slow, quiet magic that rose up with the candles and spread out until the room was filled from ceiling to floor - 
            The children were enchanted.  It was their magic; magic they'd made themselves with their own hands. It's something you only see in children: the unquestioned acceptance of wonder.  There's no looking for the wires behind the illusion, just a simple, absolute yes, an utter absorption in the moment.  In the darkness, they sat and they watched, and they sat and they watched -
            That was magic too.

Popo de Elefante

At the end of October we invited a few friends around for a light spot of Halloween cheer.  We even had a theme - worst nightmares in food and dress.
            Unfortunately for us, my "agoraphobia" costume suffered a fatal structural failure half an hour before the party started (the damned pigeon fell off my head), and on a warm October night, Mr "Arachnophobia" Tabubil flatly refused to wear 6 inches of fiberfill around his chest. To show willing, he hot glued a few wads of stuffing and a couple of spiders to and old t-shirt.  He looked a nightmare all right - a nightmare of last-minute design, and he lost his temper along with his stuffing.
            That's sort of how the evening went. Our friend Sal - rather a man's man - had found the food something of a stretch.  He's not a natural cook, so I set him a simple quiche - eggs, cheese and icky food coloring in a pre-made bought pastry shell.  Half an hour before the party (right when I was wrestling pigeons) he  called from the supermarket in a panic - the recipe had been in imperial measurements and he'd converted everything to grams to eight decimal places, but he was having trouble figuring out what sort of eggs he should buy - vitamin fortified?  Omega 3?  Grade AA?  Grade A?  Did he need to buy a baking dish?
            He arrived at the party 45 minutes late, looking cross and flustered.  He handed me a bag of chips and a jar of salsa.
            "The whole afternoon's been a horror show." He said sourly.  "I hate supermarkets. Why didn't you tell me that a quiche has too cook for an hour? Believe me, the chips count."*

*Speaking of horror shows, you wouldn't believe what a little pulverized walnut does to the look of  guacamole.  It's unspeakable.  Five stars and two hearty thumbs up. I recommend it for all your holiday parties.

And then there was the dessert.  Mr Tabubil and I own a recipe for chocolate mousse.  I may have mentioned it once or twice before, in passing. To do it right, you soak raisins in rum for an entire week beforehand and you use rather a lot of heavy cream  - 
           A triple batch of it makes a rather nice bowl of popo de elephante (elephant poop.): a voluptuous tureen of turds, studded with oozing alcoholic raisins, the heavy smell of rum rising up like drunken heat in summer* from the swirl of well-set soup -

*I might have used two full cups of rum in the raisins, and I might have tipped what was left in the bottle into the bowl as I stirred. Waste is a terrible thing.

After a couple of hours staring at the guacamole, our guests ate lots of it. With a pleasantly buzzy fruit drink on the side.  The blood-red ice hand floating in the punch bowl was a nifty touch. They giggled. And drank some more.  And ate a second helpings of the mousse  -
            Not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of our guests got pished.
            One young lady had three glasses before we caught her.  She giggled, climbed carefully onto the sofa and closed her eyes -  right next to Sal - who is Bermudan and treats his relationship with rum like a religion, but who was lying with his head on the back of his chair and his feet up on hers, sort of snoring, and cradling his third bowl of elephant poop.

Post-script:
We really had radically overestimated how much mousse we'd need for a party of 12, and the next morning we still had a couple of liters of the stuff.  
            We gave it to our neighbors. They brought the bowl back the very next day - licked clean.
            Looking at us sort of anxiously, "That was the best dessert" they said "that we have ever had in our lives - would you like a plant?" 
            And they thrust a potted fern at our chests.

It must have been some seriously good mousse.

Things that go Gulp in the night.

If you're going to spend October 31st sitting on the floor with a pile of books, and if your sci-fi pulp turns out to be horror fiction, don't keep on reading.
            It might be cheesy in the daylight, but at night you might just have to sleep with the bathroom light on, with mirrors carefully angled to point the light directly at your face. On account of tentacles.
            And your husband might get fed up and leave the bed and go sleep in the living room where it is dark. Without you. Which is even worse. On account of tentacles.

Halloween in the Calle Rosas

This morning my mother-in-law  took a little trip into Centro - the old heart of Santiago -  for a little Halloween shopping.
            Our first stop was a little arcade just outside the Plaza de Armas- the arcade was mostly hairdressers and cell-phone-cover stores, but I remembered a little toy store in there that had a wall of boxes full of rubber animals. You know the sort of thing - rubber snakes and technicolor stegosaurus and wolf-spiders with fangs the size of hubcaps. I wanted to see if they had any plastic rats.
            Did they have plastic rats? Does New York have a Big Apple in it? Did Gustave Eiffel design some rather nice train stations in South America? Did they have rats?! -
            We left the shop with a bag full of big black red-eyed rodents, a handful of little black mice and a clutch of nasty rubber spiders. My mother-in-law insisted on carrying the bag.

On the back side of the Plaza de Armas is a street called Calle Rosas. Down the west end of the street there are shops selling fabric and sewing machines and fabrics and parts for sewing machines, but what Calle Rosas really does is parties.
            Chileans take parties seriously. For a start, you need a pinata. And hats, lots of hats. Not the good old Australian party standby - the paper cone with an elastic band to go under the chin and maybe a streamer at the top, but crowns with jewels on, and policeman's helmets, and dragons to roost on your head and coil down around your ears, and Egyptian cobras done in gold lame, and pirate's tricorns, and veddy English top hats, and feather bonnets, and green fedoras and flapper cloches -
            Hatted out, you need your streamers and balloons. And banners, done up in glitter with the name of the guest of honor written three feet high, and horns and hooters and poppers and silly string - 
            Imagine all that and then, add Halloween. Calle Rosas had gone bananas. There was no other word for it - the stores that normally can't breath for confetti and paper streamers were tricked out (see what i did there?!) in balloons and paper bats - there was so much Halloween dangling from the ceilings of the stores that you had to enter in a sort of semi-crouch and sidle around barrels full of rubber masks and plastic pitchforks with plastic blood on to even get inside. 
            We started in the smaller stores that exist wistfully on the fringes of things where Calle Rosas bumps into Veintiuno de Mayo (21 May 1879, the Battle of Iquique. Chileans like to name streets after significant dates) and, creeping bent between racks of vampire capes (basic black, sex-bomb red, virginal white, or cotton-candy pink) we came away with bunting and streamers and bags and bags of little black plastic spiders. 
            And we bought Mr Tabubil a hat - a black bowler with cobwebs and big round eyeballs on it, and dangling wads of grey cheesecloth from around its ears. It is glorious.
            Our purchases were bagged by fellow in a cowl and a hockey mask, who gurgled liquidly when we said Gracias. He had coughed at us when we entered, liquid and hacking, and when we flinched, he had  reeled sideways into the arms of a dancing skeleton and clutched at a plastic pike with plastic blood on the handle - he was having a wonderful day. 
            After that we braved the bigger party stores.  Who knew what we'd see?  
            If we could get through the doors.  It wasn't the flying bats or the whispering ghosts or the jiggling hanged men with battery-operated jiggles - it was the flying bats and the whispering ghosts and the jiggling hanged men.  But mostly it was the people.  I don't know if any stores made any money anywhere else in Santiago today, because the entire city was out shopping in Calle Rosas. The only thing that made the experience bearable was the army of pumpkin-shirted men and women that patrolled the crowd, looking to latch onto anyone sufficiently wide-eyed and desperate, and took you and your shopping list in hand and dragged you bodily through the scrum.
            They did abandon us, sporadically, so that we could be menaced by men in hockey masks (clearly the spook-face of the year) and army jackets that looked as if they'd been shredded by claws and buried for a month. A monster would come close - and closer, and we'd notice that behind the hockey mask was another mask - this one with scars and maggots and a reek of fresh rubber. Bending down, he'd shrug, slightly, and we'd notice that the clinking sound we were hearing was the chains that he wore draped across his shoulders and over his chest, and we'd see that his leather motorcycle gauntlets were shredded by the same steel claws that had done for his coat, and once he'd seen that we'd seen, he settled down to make us feel really uncomfortable.
            Above us, the ceiling howled and cackled and laughed manically, mechanically, because every single square foot of it was occupied by those whispering ghosts and jiggling hanged men, and a little girl, screaming with laughter, was jumping up and down and setting them all off.
            We laughed too, and our hockey-mask maniac winked at us and shuffled off to menace someone else.
 
Outside the store, we walked to the end of the street and there was no more Halloween, anywhere at all.  It was a whole festival confined to that one street, and nowhere else in the city. We caught a taxi and drove home and unpacked our loot on the kitchen ledge.
            It's all about context, I think.  Take our Ghastly Severed Hand, for instance.  At a Halloween store, no-one would look at it twice, but at mid-afternoon outside the Calle Rosas, when Mr Tabubil came around the corner from the laundry and saw it lying on the kitchen ledge, he hit the ceiling. 
            Quite literally.  He screamed and then he jumped.            
            It is a rather good severed hand.  
            Also, there is a small black rat sitting on Mr Tabubil's nightstand.  My mother-in-law and I are trying a small psychological experiment.

Possibly a Scream. In the Dark. But not in my Living Room. Thank You.

So -
There's this art blog called This is Colossal that showcases young and contemporary artists and mostly, generally and specifically, I adore it. As with any venue, some of the stuff leaves me cold, some of the stuff leaves me wishing I had room in my house for a 10x14 foot wall installation, and sometimes I see something that makes me sit up and go "Oh."
And every single time, I crave what I have seen with every sinew and fiber of my being, and I damn my middle-class bank account. 
            This morning I found Livio Scarpella, a marble sculptor who is just the most. The skill, the craft, the artistry, the sheer nous and po-mo irony of his subject matter - I adore it and I want it.  I want it right in my living room.  And there's only one little problem with that. When i imagine actually possessing one of these remarkable works, I come out in cold gooseflesh all down the back of my neck. It's simply that I couldn't bear the thought of tiptoeing  to the kitchen in the middle of the night knowing that it was waiting for me in the dark.
            I showed the sculptures to Mr Tabubil, and I had to hold him by the shirt to keep him in front of the computer screen.
            "AUGGGGHHHHH."  He said.  "I do not want. I do not want to see, actually, and what's wrong with you AUUGGGHHH. Are you completely out of your mind?"  
            I must be, because they're just... divine, no?  What sort of crazy, fertile, splendid, febrile brain came up with this stuff?

Alice of Wonderland, Scourge of Cobwebs, Despoiler of Halloweens Everywhere

I began sewing this dress a couple of years ago for an Alice of Wonderland party, but I never finished it. I was dressing as the titular Alice - a rather bashy, brutal sort of Alice, with a contract out on the head (complete with frozen glass eyes and a zipper to make a purse) of the Cheshire Cat. On the morning of the party, before the final seams were sewn, Zoe, the party's hostess, called in floods of tears.  She'd found her beloved cat Horse lying in the back garden, dead from a snake-bite.
            We were all shattered. My costume stayed unfinished. There are some things that nice people just don't do. 
           Three years later, Alice of Wonderland, Cheshire Cat Hunter, received her last stitch.  And she was a most appropriately Halloween-y sort of costume - absolutely loaded with horror and dread, and the day after the party, in the cold light of morning, what fifteen assorted people cannot understand is how European Civilization survived half a millennium of hoopskirts. 
            I couldn't pass a decorative cobweb without trying to take it away with me on my pink petticoat - as well as whatever the cobweb had been attached to, which was usually a chair, which meant that whoever was sitting on the chair came too.  I nearly took down the buffet when I leaned gingerly in for a pineapple kebab - the hostess had cleverly swapped out the tablecloth for more cobwebs, and when three people reached out to catch me, i found that the pork platter and a bowl of punch were strung out on a cobweb lead line, teetering on the brink of total party disaster.   
            I was banned from the living room the second time I passed the coffee table - my swinging skirts were setting glasses of punch flying. That second pass had taken out the refills of the ruins of the first, and as I fled, disgraced, the conversation turned from how the hostess had illegally given herself a bye into the semi-finals of the Pictionary tournament, and moved onto candles and farthingales and pocket-hoops and how on earth the Victorians had managed to survive the bustle.  Those inventive Victorians had lit their houses with kerosene lamp and gas burners at the ends of clumsy rubber hoses. Swinging hoops are bad enough, but a bustle you can't see coming or going - the mind shudders.
            I had hoped that the other guests would thank heaven for small mercies and call me back, but instead I was banished to the corner of the dining room and set counting the votes for the costume contest. The seal on my funk was set when I found that people had been writing opinions in the margins of their ballots - my Alice dress had narrowly missed out on the prize for "most genuinely frightening costume" because people were worried that someone would have to present that prize to me in person.

And the evening's true ignominy? The final seal and funk? 
Reader - it was my party.

Happy Halloween!

We have descended into the dark underbelly of the kitchen construction industry, and are only just beginning the long claw out.  Posting shall remain sporadic.  Eat some horseradish and sirachi sauce off of a skull, and pretend you're down here with us.

Happy Halloween!

A Sugar-free Halloween

Sophie in Toronto has a Plan.  She doesn't want two-year-old Pascal to get the idea that Halloween is a candy-grab, so she's planning to dress him up in a costume and take him out into the street with a basket of candy to give OTHER children.

"You see" she explained "maybe - probably - he'll get a few bits of candy back, but I think it's a good idea to work on the concepts of generosity and giving instead of receiving, don't you?  I think we'll keep it up until he's about six years old.  And THEN we'll do trick or treating on our own."

Good luck with that, Sophie.  I await the results of these experiments with great interest.

Marginally related:

Last year I was in Vancouver for Halloween.  The baby who lives next door to Mum and Dad was less than a year old, and far too small to have any interest whatsoever in candy, but the occasion gave her parents an excuse to dress a baby in a dinosaur costume, and  a sugar-free trick-or-treater knocking on our door gave Mum and I an excuse to have a little baby-scale Halloween fun.