Oddly quiet night here. Big change from last year when everyone seemed to be going all-out because they finally felt like they could.
Tag: Pumpkin
Pokemon Pumpkin Parade
We went with a Pokemon theme again for this year’s Jack-O’Lanterns. Katie did the Vulpix and the Squirtle, while J. started the Chandelure, I continued it, and Katie finished it.
Having found a carvable teal artificial pumpkin, and decided on Pokemon, Squirtle seemed the perfect choice!
Edited to add: Believe it or not, that’s not daylight, it’s the streetlight. They recently put in new white LED lighting in the neighborhood.
Pokemon Pumpkins
Patterns found online and carved by the mom-and-son team.
Ant-Man Approves of this Jack O’Lantern
The kiddo managed to get another Halloween out of last year’s homemade Minecraft Spider Jockey costume. But it’s not easy to run around and play in, so we offered to buy him an alternate for parties, and he chose Ant-Man. Curiously, the costume didn’t come with gloves, so Katie took a pair of plain black gloves and attached controls to them.
It’s a good thing we had it, though, because the straps on the spider started digging into his shoulders a couple of blocks into trick-or-treating and he wanted to come home early. (But not before running into a Steve? in diamond armor!)
Cue the alternate costume!
Oh, and check out this year’s pumpkin carving as well! Hardly anyone saw it, because all the trick-or-treating action seemed to be a block away, and no one walked up to our door until 9:00.
Ant-Man’s helmet is carved on a real pumpkin. The goofy face on the right is a plastic one from a few years back.
All Pumpkin, all the Time
Now you can have pumpkin spice milk on your pumpkin cereal!
Also interesting: “almond beverage” rather than “almond milk.”
Teal Pumpkins Go Retail
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?)
A Teal Pumpkin for Halloween
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.