A Very Swedish Halloween

As most of you know, I happen to love Halloween, so I was intrigued to hear that they sort of celebrate Halloween. How do you sort of celebrate something, one might ask? Well, turns out the answer is to not actually celebrate it at all. I guess they didnt start celebrating at all until about 10 years ago, and it started to get popular and then just sort of fizzled out. At toy stores they sell a few costumes and decorations, and I noticed bakeries selling cakes shaped like pumpkins that were undoubtably made out of marzipan (gross!), but most people at my work forgot it was even halloween. My boss said that he took his kids out trick or treating (known as, "Bus eller Godis" in swedish) on Wednesday evening (the 29th). And a few people said they were going to a party in a week or so. So it seems to me that they miss the point that Halloween is supposed to be celebrated, well, on Halloween. Especially since it convienently fell on a Friday this year! Oh, Swedes!

I couldnt not celebrate Halloween, so we decided to have a few people over to carve pumpkins and drink hot apple cider. In total we had 7 Swedes, 3 Americans (including us), 1 German, and 1 Italian. I dressed up as a cat, because it happened to be the easiest costume I could think of. All I had to do was draw ears and tape them to a headband, and then paint some whiskers on. Easy-peasy. Blake bought some silly giant rubber ears that he wore for about 2 minutes, and we didnt even get a picture of them. I made some pumpkin themed recipes and we were ready to par-tay. Here are some of our guests, Ylva and Pär enjoying the fondue (notice it was served in a pumpkin... pretty awesome):



We only bought 4 pumpkins to carve, so the crowd sort of split up to share in them. We taught them the basics of cutting open the top and pulling out the innards, and them told them to carve whatever they wanted. They all seemed to get into it:







Karin and I made an Obama pumpkin (of course):



Ylva had some fun with nail polish and made a joker face:



Pär and Alina made a goal of trying to carve out the most pumpkin as possible in a cool random design, while Anna and the other Per with the help of a few others went with a goofy jack-o-lantern, complete with ears. I was pretty impressed with them all, especially for first timers:



Here is everyone (a few other people dressed up too, including a Swedish Chef!) and our creations: