So, after being in university for the past 5 years, I have grown accustomed to Hallowe’en being more like Hallowe’ek. You can imagine my surprise to find out that it’s not such a big deal in England. In fact, only two out of the seven people who live in my house even had Hallowe’en related plans for that evening. And one of those two people was just tagging along at the last minute (he didn’t even wear a costume). For the first time in 5 years I didn’t go out for hallowe’en, I didn’t even have a costume, or candy. The only remotely Hallowe’eny thing we had was a jack-o-lantern. This was my idea.

There is a fresh produce market right next to my house and they had been selling pumpkins for about a month, so when I saw that the big ones were slowly dwindling I snagged one of the last ones. I kept it in my room for about a week until I decided it was close enough to halloween to carve it (October 29th).  My original plan was just to carve the words ManHouse 2 into one side but when Richard saw me with it in the kitchen he insisted on something different. Within three minutes, he was handing me a black and white photo of William Shatner and I was given the task of putting pen to pumpkin, or in this case purple sharpie.

After about half an hour and a quick trip to the Spar to get emergency toothpicks (or cocktail sticks if you’re English) and we had our Hallowe’en spirit. We put the Captain on our porch and lit him up for the neighbourhood to enjoy.

The only bad thing about the pumpkin is that it made us look like we were Hallowe’en ready so when we had our one and only trick-or-treater I had to tell him we didn’t have anything to offer. I almost felt bad enough to go nextdoor to buy candy. Almost.