Meg

Halloween! I’ve been saving up all my events so that I could roll them all together in one post. Halloween in England is a relatively subdued event. We usually put decorations up the day before, (or on the day itself if we’re particularly unorganised that year) that is if we put decorations up at all. The Trick or Treaters start turning up around 5.30pm in their supermarket bought costumes – pumpkins and witches and ghosts – and then at about 8.30pm my Dad turns out all the lights that would be visible from the front of the house and pretends we’re not in. The decorations come down the next day. It was completely different here. People have been telling me throughout all of October that Halloween is their favourite Holiday – I don’t think my Dad would consider it as anything more than an annoyance and he’s probably counting down the years until Lewis and I are too old to want to carve pumpkins or put up decorations. He certainly wouldn’t consider it a Holiday! The first decorations started appearing on the doors of the girls’ on my floor back in September. Someone started a countdown to Halloween on their white board hanging on their door. It felt like it was a proper event rather than a small blip of activity on an otherwise quiet and normal autumn evening that I’m used to.

My Halloween experiences started two weeks before the day itself with a trip to Bloomsbury Farm with my International Student group. Eleven of us, from Spain, Germany, China, Wales, Brazil, England and America, all squashed on to the back seats of the school bus (because we’re the cool kids).

The farm was about a 45minute drive from the city, through field after field of corn. We were the eldest non-parental people at the farm by at least 15 years. That naturally did not stop us queueing up with the toddlers to have a go on the big slide. We took selfies with the goats and the donkeys in the petting zoo. We took two tractor rides around the maize maze to visit the pumpkin patch. We cheered on the piglets in the pig races. We split into two groups and raced round the maze, ignoring the path for the majority of the time and forging our own way through the corn. I fired pumpkins out of a cannon on a firing range (could there be a more American thing to do?) and we squealed more than the toddlers as we went round the Haunted Corn Silo. We finished our day out with toffee apples and there were cups of steaming hot apple cider (spiced apple juice), which is delicious by the way.

Mid-October and I found myself at the students union with my American friends queueing for the Haunted House they’d set up in the ballroom. I was very impressed at the elaborateness of it! They had actors banging bloodied knives menacingly on walls, and hiding behind curtains and chalkboards before jumping out and screaming. There were Chucky dolls, a mad scientist handing out Ebola, human centipede mannequins, hideous clowns with sharp teeth, and a corridor that recreated the atmosphere of prom night in a horror film just before the murderer strikes. We might have run screaming out the doors at the end, but only because the clown was chasing us. We weren’t scared or anything…pfft.

Halloween isn’t Halloween without pumpkins, and I feel especially pleased with how cute these little pumpkins are! My RA set up a pumpkin painting evening and these are the results of my artistic endeavours.

I’m really quite impressed with myself. They sit on my window sill and spread glitter everywhere.

Thursday evening brought about the Global Buddies Halloween party. We were joined by Rosie the Riveter, a Unicorn, Pocahontas, a Greek Goddess, a Nerd, a Hipster, a Zombie Bride and a Nudist on Strike. We drank a weirdly pinkish drink that was pretty much liquid sugar, we ate balls of popcorn, toffee apples, miniature chocolate bars and peanut butter-filled eyeballs. There was apple bobbing and bin bags filled with slimy things to stick yours into and identify – the bag that was exuding heat was very unnerving. We told “horror” stories accompanied by YouTube’s finest creepy music and brought out the classic Halloween playlist for the rest of the party – Ghostbusters, Alice Cooper’s Poison, The Monster Mash, Highway to Hell, Thriller, Monster (What’s that coming over the hill), etc.

On Halloween itself, I was not feeling up to anything that required a significant level of preparation, so I smeared a bit of black eye shadow on my face and dribbled a bit of red lip gloss here and there and caught a midnight showing of Guardians of the Galaxy at the student union cinema. It was a nice quiet Halloween but I still got to see all the inventive costumes of the people who had been out while waiting for the bus home at 2am. Zombies with bloody gashes on their chins, a porcelain doll, several bumble bees, a teenage mutant ninja turtle, a couple of pirates, superman, batman and some scantily clad Audrey Hepburns.

Halloween will feel strange next year when it returns to lasting a mere few hours.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2014 at 4:38 pm and is filed under General, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.