Happy Trick or Treat Day

Those days are gone. The days of hyper anticipation. The days of creating costumes, carving pumpkins with the family..... decorating the outside of the house to scare our many trick'r treaters...

Now a days, Halloween is about roasting pumpkin seeds, admiring the creativity of parents and kids, as their little ones make it to our door, two or three at a time. All my years of kids and Halloween, I was always the one to walk the neighbourhood with our kids. I never got to stay home and hand out treats. That was daddy's job. He spent the entire day of Halloween putting up a cave, with creepy webs and eery lights, haunting sounds.. so, it just made sense that he would stay home and scare the crap out of the neighbourhood kids.

This Halloween is no different. We cleaned out the pumpkins last night (ok, the picture shows that Terry did that),

but I roasted the seeds. Out of 4 nice sized pumpkins, I got 4 cups of seeds. I like leaving the little bits of pumpkin on them.

I use to wash them off, but it made the seeds quite soggy, and by leaving the little bits on , they seem to absorb more of the butter and garlic and roast very nicely.

This time, I used left over garlic butter, and didn't add as much garlic powder to my recipe.. and they were particularly yummy. Even Terry tried them and said they were pretty good and he doesn't generally like them.

Below, you will find an oddity. In all our years of gutting pumpkins.. this was a first. There was a seed taking sprout inside the pumpkin. Very cool. Actually, Suzanne and I found a leaf spouting in an apple once too... very cool.

Another fun part of Halloween is buying the treats. I finally figured out a few years ago that there is no need to buy the treats in early Oct. They just get eaten by the pre Halloween treat testers. I now feel that I can confidently buy treats either the day of the day before Halloween. There will be lots of treats somewhere to buy. We headed out to Zellers buy my favorite treat to give out.. and that is microwave popcorn in little bags, and when you pop it, it comes out orange. We got a box of chocolate bars too, but Terry said we are not giving them out unless we really NEED to. When we were unwrapping our boxes of popcorn, Terry read on the box "Diacetyl Free". We weren't sure what that was, but it must be a good thing. Its the next thing we need to avoid I figure... if only I knew how to say it.

Wouldn't be halloween, either, without dressing someone like a lady bug. I couldn't catch Tonks... so Paralax wore it... not for very long though!

Happy Halloween Everyone..