Cool: Michael’s is selling plastic teal pumpkins for people who plan on offering non-food treats for allergic trick or treaters as part of the Teal Pumpkin Project. You can still paint a pumpkin teal, of course, but this simplifies the setup. (Are we really that close to Halloween already?)
I haven’t been to Comikaze Expo since their first year. It’s always been close to Long Beach Comic-Con, and I’d choose Long Beach every time. This year, though, LBCC was in mid-September, and Comikaze was Halloween weekend. And since we missed out on San Diego, it seemed like a good plan for a family comic-con.
Alas, the best laid schemes…
The kiddo and I have both been dealing with a cold all week, and last night’s attempt at trick-or-treating made it clear that going into LA and spending the day at a huge convention wasn’t going to work out too well. With or without cosplay.
But we tossed up a few Halloween decorations, and I managed to spookify one of my shots from our marsh hike a few weeks back, and J. had a chance to wear the Mixed Emotions costume (all the emotions from Inside Out) we’ve been piecing together all month.
Incidentally…yeah, that’s a Christmas display behind him. On Halloween.
Christmas strikes deeper into Halloween’s territory, continuing a relentless campaign that began decades ago in response to a 1993 incursion from Halloween Town.
In recent years, Halloween has shored up its position by moving into previously unclaimed parts of the calendar in early October and September, itself running roughshod over tentative efforts by Oktoberfest to establish a foothold. Growth of adult Halloween parties with free-flowing alcohol have ensured that Oktoberfest can only offer one advantage over Halloween: Lederhosen. And you can wear those on Halloween too.
Late Halloween night, the first rainstorm of the season blew through town. By morning, it had mostly passed over us, but there were enough clouds around to make things look interesting after I dropped off my car for maintenance. With a couple of hours to kill, I walked to downtown Manhattan Beach for breakfast. I kept going all the way to the pier first, and was glad I did — otherwise I would have missed this:
One straggling cloud continued to drop rain on the coast a few miles to the north. A rainbow fragment neatly arced from the cloud down to the El Segundo power plant. (I thought that was kind of ironic.) Continue reading
The idea behind the Teal Pumpkin Project is to offer alternate Halloween treats that aren’t candy, so that kids with severe food allergies can still go Trick-or-Treating. It started last year in Tennessee, and FARE picked it up and promoted it nationwide this year.
When I was a child, I always had to either decline or discard some of my Halloween candy because of my peanut allergy. Fortunately it wasn’t life-threatening for me at the time (that came later), so I could separate them out at the end of the night. A lot of kids develop severe allergies younger than I did, and a lot of them are sensitive enough that the risk of cross-contact — whether in the candy bowl or at the factory — is a major issue.
So in addition to candy, we picked up an assortment of pencils, plastic dinosaurs, hair ribbons and more, and kept them in a separate tray. We painted a fake pumpkin so we could keep it around (though we’ll have to go over it again with better paint or maybe a coat of primer next year), and set it out front where it could be seen from the street. (Update 2021: You can buy plastic pumpkins in teal from a lot of stores these days!)
I’m not sure how many of the kids who chose the toys over the candy did so because of allergies, but we had enough of both to go around.
