Wordless Wednesday: Leftover Halloween Shenanigans

 

All Our Saints

 

What with the pandemic and all, we skipped the regular trick or treating this year.

Instead, we all dressed up as saints and trick or treated indoors!

The way this worked is that we each had a bag of candy to give out and a bag for candy collection.

It was a bit chaotic, but very fun!

 

 Pa was St. Bruno, with his fuzzy brown bear robe.

Here we have St. Michael, St. Raphael, and Our Lady of Guadalupe (Mxyl, Leena, and Klenda).

And here is St. Denis (with his head chopped off), a poor soul, and St. John Paul II (Zorg, Choclo, and Oob).

And here are the Emperor as St. Florian (patron saint of firefighters) and me as St. Monica (I just want my children to be saints!).

And, last but not least, we have Mumpy as St. Rose of Llama.

And a happy All Souls to everyone, while we are at it!

I think I am going to try making these Soul Cakes today, although we are putting off our cemetery visit until tomorrow when the Emperor can come along (he has off for election day).

Cute and Easy Halloween Cookies

 

We won't be trick or treating this year, or giving out candy, because of the pandemic.  It really made me think about how nice a tradition trick or treating is, and how much we miss connecting with our neighbors.

So we decided to make some Halloween cookies to drop off on our neighbor's porches!

We made a cookie a day for three days, starting with the longest keeping cookies.  You can also freeze the cookies as you make them if you were taking more time (which is what I do with Christmas cookies).

Our first cookies were these mummy cookies (possibly because we had just watched Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy).

 

 

 

 

 

Our recipe is here, developed during one of our Ancient Egypt studies.

You could also use any sugar cookie dough- just shape it into sort of flattened peanuts.

We simplified the wrapping marks by making them with forks, and we added little eyes with sprinkles.

The powdered sugar helps accent the wrapping marks.

Next up were eyeball cookies.  

This is ordinary chocolate chip cookie dough without the chips, but you could do it with chips, even with pre-made sugar cookie or chocolate chip cookie dough.

We added raspberry flavor and red food coloring to make them look more monstery, but there are loads of possible color and flavor combinations!

The eye ball parts are white chocolate melting disks with a chocolate chip on top to look like a pupil.

Once baked, the cookies spread a little, but the chocolates held the circle shape nicely.

The raspberry-white chocolate-dark chocolate combination was delicious! 

Lastly we made brownies, mostly because I thought a cookie plate with three cookies has to have more chocolate.  

We used our normal brownie recipe, and then I squirted on some melted white chocolate in sort of ghost shaped squiggles.

I added some fall leaf sprinkles to fancy it up a bit since I thought my ghost squiggles looked a lot more squiggly than ghosty!

Bigger families got more cookies

 

This is what the "plates" ended up looking like (the plates are recycled takeout containers).

We cut out pumpkin shaped tags and wrote little notes to accompany the cookies, then went off and placed them strategically on porches.

Not a normal Halloween, but at least a bit of neighborly connection.

Happy Halloween!

Wordless Wednesday: Pumpkins!

 

Halloween Costumes

 Oob is the last one of true trick or treating age, and this is his last year (let us pause as I sob into my bowl of kitkats).

He went as St. Luke (known to St. Paul as the Beloved Physician).  Leena accompanied him as his guardian angel.

Meanwhile, Choclo handed out candy dressed as The Shark King, much to the delight of every child that came to our door.







He would announce,"I am The Shark King! I am here to give you the greatest treasure of the sea...CANDY!"




My favorite time was when a dad yelled during the dramatic pause: TUNA FISH!?  His four year old was appalled, but Choclo reassured the lad with his Shark King voice, that the true treasure was CANDY.

Although now I think it would be hilarious to give out tuna fish. 

Saturday night was Scary Movie Night with the Scouts.  Zorg, who is becoming a Cub adult leader, went long dressed as this.

Choclo and Oob went dressed in hazmat suits (their patrol is the Biohazards). And I forgot to get a picture...

And I need to stop eating Kitkats now.

Hope you had a happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween!

 We made haunted houses (where you open windows and doors for a scary surprise).

 Choclo did a haunted mountain.

Oob did a haunted castle.

Leena did a coral, haunted by a squid!

 And, of course, we carved pumpkins!

Costume pictures tomorrow!

Wordless Wednesday: Costumes

Getting Ready for Halloween

 It's almost here!

 We've been painting pumpkins and webbing up the front porch.

This year we have a lot of actual spiderwebs which have been building up over the past month.  I'm not sure where the actual spiders came from, but the real and fake webs can stay for another week!

We will carve the pumpkins this weekend, which probably means roasted pumpkin seeds: yum!

I think I might also cook one of the eating pumpkins, maybe for pie,, or maybe to make candied pumpkin (double yum!).

Choclo and Oob haven't chosen costumes yet, which is fine by me.  I learned a long time ago not to set up costumes too early - they will invariably be tired of them and make something else at the last minute.

The older Zoomlians have picked out the candy they will be giving out, so the critical part is done!

Wordless Wednesday: All Saints Costumes