An Anti-Pinterest Halloween Celebration

Before we had kids, Halloween was my favourite holiday - I always thought it was a shame we didn't have a national day off to celebrate with due pomp and circumstance. Eva's a bit too young to really embrace the whole monsters, ghouls and spooks thing - and she'll push pasta to the side if it's decorated with even a suspected smidgeon of sauce rather than good old-fashioned toddler-tastic butter, so a meal comprising dead mens fingers, eyeballs, maggots and witches stew probably wouldn't go down too well - but we still managed to honour the occasion as best we could.

We painted pumpkins (look out for this picture going viral on Pinterest, I can just see it):

We made mutant spiders from paper plates and pipe cleaners and hung them from the ceiling in the hall:

I baked a chocolate orange spiderweb cake:

And we invited a pirate skeleton, a princess, a cat, a pumpkin, a devil, a mummy and a witch to join a vampire pirate and a very cute bat girl for 'spooky toddler tea' (soundtrack: Thriller, Time Warp and the Addams Family). Here's the buffet table:

This is how spider web biscuits turn out if you let the kids do the icing entirely by themselves:

Fairy cakes made by a princess and a cat:

A spooky fruit platter:

The pumpkins outside on the front porch:

And lit up at night to entice one group of inceasingly terrifyingly dressed trick or treaters after another to knock on in search of Halloween candy. I wasn't sure how Eva would feel about giving away her precious chocolate stash, but she immediately got into the spirit of things, standing on the front step and bellowing into the night: "Come on trick-treaters we have candy for you, tell all your friends!".

The squeamish may wish to look away from the state of our kitchen once the last guest had departed:

Happy Halloween, one and all! Do come back over the weekend as I'm planning to share either a post about Natalia's new beanbags or her new olive tree chandelier.