Sunday 1 November 2009

Socks and Samhain surprises!

The finished sock!!!!! A little short in the foot length even for me but it has proved that I can do it. The heel shaping was much easier than I thought and I have plans to make some in some proper sock yarn for the boys. There is some really cool sock yarn out there!

And so to Samhain or Halloween as it is better known. I am not going to begin to explain it here because my friend Liz does a much better job of than I could ever do, here. We did the 'usual' things..hollowed out pumpkin lit up with candles, or in this case, squash.But this time, instead of hiding indoors, we had a fire outside and lit the garden with candles and lanterns that were made from jars and black paper. The chimnea worked really well on this occasion and we played Chinese whispers and eye spy in the dark around the fire.


Some of the nice things we made to eat....


And some of the gruesome creations for the feely box, that Tom and I made up.
Mashed brains...

Eyeballs in intestines?....

Baked apples still warm (hearts), stodgy porridge oats with water (sick) and slimy pasta slugs which even looked like slugs as we died them very dark purple. If you look carefully you can see a stray one in the pictures above!!
I dug out the face paints, googled a few images, added a little imagination (and Rob's creative mastery for my hat)and this is what we all looked like!!!
Mummy witch and Willie Wizard..

The Mask and Milo, aka Tommy and Louis...

Jonny the Joker...

And David the vampire....

We all had a good time and it was good to celebrate something without any commercial influence. This is our prelude to Winter Solstice and Yule as opposed to the awful hyped up Christmas that now takes over our lives, whether we want it to or not. We have always tried to stay away from the mainstream cheap, plastic, throwaway culture but not managed to create what I felt was a really good alternative. This has given me hope that with them all on side we can create celebrations the way we want them to be. Neither of us have ever been 'religious' so that part of it eludes us, so the Pagan approach was the obvious choice as it already is a part of us without us realising it.

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