Happy Halloween

I was never much of a Halloween person when I lived in the US. Sure when I was little and could get some free candy out of dressing up and trick-or-treating I loved Halloween, but once you get past a certain age dressing up and running door to door is just creepy and/or sad and not very likely to result in free candy, so Halloween just became another one of those nights where I just sit on the couch watching (scary) movies and pretend not to be home when someone knocked on the door.

But as the old saying goes, you never know what you got until it's gone. Halloween is not a big thing in France, although it is certainly gaining in popularity, so around the end of October every year, my holiday spirit starts to perk up a bit.


Halloween starts with Jack-o'-Lanterns. We were unable to find normal, American sized pumpkins so we settled for a couple small European ones. I also did not have any real carving tools (just a single kitchen knife), and more importantly no artistic talent of any kind, so the resulting Jack-o'-Lanterns are unlikely to impress most, but I am fairly sure they were the only ones on my street, so I was proud of them.

Costumes are the next most important thing for Halloween. As I am sure I have mentioned before, George and I have very few possessions, so spontaneous costume making is a really difficult task for us. There are a couple costume rental places in Lyon, but their offerings are either cookie-cutter and lame, or extremely expensive, so we spent a few days browsing and thinking before coming up with something we hoped wouldn't put us in the lame-last-minute-costume crowd. I have a few fake musical instruments laying around the house (Rock Band!), so George decided to be a hippie rockstar, and I always have a fridge full of cheese so I decided to be this:

La Vache qui Rit (The Laughing Cow)
Jack-o'-Lanterns: Check
Costumes: Check!
Party: Oh yeah

George pulling on my teats
A few friends of ours here throw a pretty rockin' Halloween bash every year, so we put on our dancing shoes and our new, cool costumes and went out to shake our things.



Happy Halloween Everyone!!!