Pretty Little Pumpkins

Halloween is pretty low-key out here in Egypt. It’s not really a holiday here so the reasons for that are pretty self-explanatory. Except for the fact that Egyptian teenagers have decided that buying hundreds of eggs and throwing them at stuff (cars, houses, apartments, bawwabs, other people) is a worthwhile and fulfilling holiday activity…

This year we sent Grandma out to find a pumpkin while we all stayed home and played and did homework and slept. I think Miriam and I did most of the sleeping, Rachel did most of the playing, and Andrew did most of the homeworking.

There were no big parties in the street this year (thank goodness) and we didn’t go out to visit friends or anything exciting like that. But we’re not entirely boring….
The girls dressed up in the pumpkin hats I crocheted a while back and Rachel was excited to wear her Halloween outfit again.



In the evening after dinner we carved the pumpkin that Grandma brought home. Grandma had a Skype conversation going on with Auntie Em and Rachel was so torn between the two activities.

“I’ll be right back!” she’d say, racing back and forth between pumpkin and Emily.

Before we started carving the pumpkin we tried to get a shot of Miriam sleeping on top of it. She totally wasn’t into it…



Rachel thought the inside of the pumpkin was dirty, slimy, and yucky, but she braved through it and helped scoop out the insides, anyway. Then we gave her the plastic tools and let her play with the top of the pumpkin and the pieces that Daddy cut out using the real knives.



Karen took some family pictures of us. I don’t think we ever quite got all our faces looking the same direction. Even the jack-o-lantern couldn’t stay still!



After taking a few pictures we turned out all the lights and watched the jack-o-lantern flicker in the darkness. Rachel was full of love for everybody and kept hopping up and down and running around to kiss and cuddle various people and pumpkins. A little too much excitement for one night—it’s a good thing we didn’t do any trick-or-treating (she hasn’t been introduced to that yet).



Rachel decided that the pumpkin was a girl, although she never did give it a name. “Let me hold her,” and “She’s pretty,” were our only indications that the pumpkin had achieved gender.



And as much as Miriam wasn’t fond of the pumpkin in the beginning, she was all about the jack-o-lantern in the end. She was doing impersonations and everything!



Happy Halloween!