Halloween

Call me a party-pooper if you wish but I have always detested participating in Guising or Trick or Treat (depending on where one was brought up) and other Halloween shenanigans.

The only thing I can ever recall getting involved in at Halloween, and enjoying, was as a child in Liverpool where we called it Duck Apple Night and had a tradition of ducking or bobbing for apples as well as trying to eat apples suspended from a line across the room suspended between the picture rails. Somewhere I have a photo which I had hoped to use of my family dookin' apples (they were brought up in Scotland) but it hasn't been digitised and I can't find it. However we used to host a party of our friends and their children in our barn with a firework display added:

Years ago the following appeared in, I think, the Liverpool Echo:

I'm recalling bygone traditions

That never cost the earth

Do you remember duck apple night?

What a gear family night!

Apples bobbing up and down

In an enormous enamel bowl

A silver tanner embedded in a bruised apple

The winner takes all

Snap apple was next on the agenda

A line of string rigged up

By my ever-resourceful mam

Rosy apples strategically places

Some high, some low, our hands tied securely

Behind our backs, quite a difficult task.

Laughs galore as well as crafty cheating

By the older siblings of course

How sad our old-fashioned traditions

Have been sabotaged, duck apple night

Has been Americanised, trick or treat, 

Halloween, witches and broomsticks

Author unknown (to me). 

Having said all that, when I was in Canada in 2005 visiting a friend from my teenage years I happened to arrive at the time when they were getting the pumpkins ready. Pumpkins like I had never seen before. (It was just before my New Zealand life). I carved my first, and only, pumpkin.

My friend (who died last year) and her daughter.

That never cost the eart