Trick or Treat?

We have just celebrated our first Halloween in Sydney. Like most holidays, Halloween in Sydney had a way of making us long for America. The holiday is fairly controversial here in Sydney and is not widely celebrated. Those that do celebrate, seem to have adopted the more "evil" side of Halloween and have left much of the fun, community minded side of Halloween that we know and love somewhere in the garbage with the pumpkin guts. This lends to a difficult decision for the mom of American kids. Do we continue with our Halloween traditions in spite of the way that looks to those around us, or do we succumb to pressure to steer clear of the "evil, pagan holiday?" After much deliberation, we decided to carry on with our family traditions and focus on the wonderful, positive aspects of Halloween.

So, we carved pumpkins - very EXPENSIVE pumpkins. Take a look at our masterpieces. $97 and an hour of work later and we have the first signs of Halloween in our yard. I will admit, it was a little strange to be carving them under the shade of an umbrella after having just applied sunscreen. It takes a little bit of the "fall fun" out of the pumpkins. But, we still carved away and even roasted the pumpkin seeds afterward.


Now that we have the required decoration, we can trick or treat. There are a few streets around us that we were told participate in Halloween so we planned to meet some other American friends there and trick or treat together. As a side note, these streets that are good ones to trick or treat on, mean about 1 in every 5 houses hands out candy. People will put out an orange balloon or pumpkin of sorts if they are participating.

But first, costumes! Because Halloween is so low key here, we went low key on the costumes too. I told the kids they could be anything they wanted as long as they found the costumes in the house. For the girls, that was easy. They just wanted to be princesses and fairies and we have an ample supply of girly costumes in the dress up corner. For the little man, he wanted to be Zeus. He is obsessed with Greek mythology right now after reading Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series. So, a toga it was. As for the babe, I just grabbed a giraffe costume from the dress up stuff and off we went. Although I must admit the little giraffe was none too happy to participate in this activity. Poor thing woke up with a fever Sunday morning so she was not really able to enjoy Halloween with us.

We met our friends at the park and prepared to descend upon the neighborhood...

Much loot collected on this hot, sunny afternoon. Time to head home...