Halloween

Ron as a solar water heater :)

The pirate who saved the princesses - I'm sure there's a story about that somewhere!

Can we get them to sit for 5 minutes?

One thing I like about holidays here is that we make them what we want. I’m personally not a big fan of scary and evil creatures abounding on Halloween and since I end up in charge of Halloween every year, I get to chose what I want to emphasize. I have no competition. How do I always end up in charge of Halloween? Simply because I am the resident American. About in August children begin to hunt me down. “Please, Miss Julie, when is the Halloween party?” they ask in their cute accents. How can I say no?

So, back to making Halloween what I want. A fall dress up party. With candy. How can they say no? Actually, some parents still think we are pushing our culture and religion (!) on them so keep their kids away. But most come. The party has outgrown our house so this year we had it in a university lounge. We asked which apartments wanted us to come trick-or-treating and set out on a very lovely evening walking to 14 different apartments all right here. The teenagers don’t know they could be smashing pumpkins or throwing eggs. The little ones don’t miss the haunted houses.

Then it’s back to the lounge for an attempt to feed the children something healthy (it didn’t work), some very loud games, and releasing them full of energy, candy, and silliness back to their parents (that was the scary part). As the parents were leaving one said to me, “You are almost Moroccan! You mixed French, English, and Arabic all night long!” to which I responded, “I’ll take that as a compliment!”