Coals and Cauldrons

It has been a quiet but agreeable Halloween. Papa is still in Glasgow and Gi. is still at Uncle Pu's and K.'s house, and T. was not particularly lively because she had spent the night (very much to my admiration, by the way) finishing her homework for university, hence the quietness. At around noon the coal for our stoves arrived and Mama eventually lit a fire in the corner room. I am huddling in one of our impressively good sleeping bags anyway, but for the first time in many months I have been able to assume my favourite perch on top of the oven, without it being cold as a tomb.

We watched television together — news of the American elections and of the Congo, glimpses of an apparently terrible docudrama on Martin Luther (the wedding scene with Katherine Bora, or I presume it was that, looked like a made-for-TV romance, except that the groom wore a monastic garb and coiffure) that aired in honour of Reformation Day, and the Halloween special of The Simpsons (which we have not watched in ages). Normally I am ambiguous about Halloween, because I don't like the garishness and mindless-consumption aspects of it, and I don't like horror films or stories. But I do like candy and pumpkins, and at times I like costumes — which, I suppose, makes me sound like a four-year-old, but what do I care. (c: As far as the Simpsons Halloween specials go, my favourites are the tale of the time-travel toaster oven and the riff on Edgar Allan Poe's "Raven." Once I did undergo a sinister Raven- (or Birds-)like scenario; it was on a chilly dawn after I had stayed up all night, and I was passing innocently along the kitchen counter when I heard a thumping, so I looked up, and there was a crow standing on the skylight and pecking at the glass, its beady expressionless eyes fixed in my direction. I was quite glad to get out of its line of sight.

Anyway, so J. went shopping for candy, and then we whiled away the hours at our computers as evening fell. In the course of said evening, two trick-or-treating groups came to the door, and Mama offered them chocolate bars. All of the sugar candy had been dumped into bowls, one for us and one for Papa and Gi., and we nibbled away at it in the meantime. Fortunately there was plenty of chocolate left for us, too. It is a pity that we hadn't any pumpkins, because in Victoria it was fun to carve them and to roast the seeds that were in the interior, and oddly I liked the musky scent that rises from the pumpkin flesh as the tealight heats and bakes the inside of the lid. (Then, less enjoyably, there was the fruit's inevitable disintegration into pale pulp, much accelerated by the onset of frost. But at least it was a fresh supply of nitrogen for the soil!) A last reason why I like Halloween is, by the way, that it is one of the dates that I psychologically clung to during my school years as the forerunners of Advent and Christmas.

After we had eaten our fill, Ge. and J. dressed up as a 19th-century gentleman and as a woodcutter, respectively. The first costume consisted of dark jeans (I think), a shirt, and a woolly grey vest; the second consisted of jeans, an orange flannel-like plaid shirt, a cap, and an ax. As for their faces, they had held a saucer over a candle so that it was coated in soot, then they dabbed the soot onto their visages to create heavy black eyebrows, a mustache, and, in Ge.'s case, impressive mutton chops. I was considering dressing up as someone from the 60s, but I haven't the least notion how to do a beehive hairdo, etc., so this year I was "person who couldn't be bothered to change out of her pyjamas." Which was a trifle awkward, because I dislike being seen in my pyjamas (it makes me feel guilty about not being ladylike and proper), and so when the people to deliver the coal came, I ducked into our tiny pantry and contemplated the courtyard for something like a quarter of an hour.