Halloween and Day of the Dead

Like my pumpkins? These were three for a dollar at the Annerley Fruit Barn. Golden Nugget variety. I'll be carving one for my C-grade Horror Movie Night on the weekend, as we lounge around for an evening of Peter Lorre, Jason, Krueger and F.W. Murnau.

I just love Halloween, and not just because it comes the night before the Day of the Dead (Dia de Los Muertos): a holiday that no one knows about here in Australia.

Day of the Dead is usually celebrated in South American countries, but also in the Phillipines and some Mexican-American communities in the U.S. It's about celebrating the life of ancestors, friends and family who've passed over (or begun their true life, as some believe), rather than being all morose about the fact that they're dead. People make effigies and icons of their dead loved ones, and it's a bright, colourful and joyful celebration with its own special foods and activities.
A few years ago, I had a go at making pan de muerto, or bread of the dead. It's a sweet, yeasty, eggy affair that I remember as being quite elaborate and involved. The recipe said to plait and cross the dough to make it look like bones. It was a complete failure, but I had a good time trying it. Soon enough, I'll try again. I'm just not very gifted at breadage.

The sugar skulls of Day of The Dead are another gorgeous reason to love this celebration. I've always said that I'd like my funeral to be a loud, sobbing, colourful New-Orleans style parade, with trumpets (very important), as seen in James Bond: Live and Let Die. Failing that, I'd also also accept a sugar effigy to be made of me, which would be placed on a shrine inside the house, surrounded with flowers, candles and photos of me, around which friends and family would gather before breaking the effigy into bits and eating it. That's probably not technically the correct procedure as practised for Day of the Dead celebrations, but I like the idea of blending voodoo, Catholic, Aztec and animist beliefs (just to irritate everyone from beyond the grave, and to give them something different to chat about afterwards).

Pumpkin scones are a good way to use up the scooped inside-pulp from your carved pumpkins. Once I decided to go all North American-style and make a real pumpkin pie, along with a pecan pie. The pumpkin pie was pretty good. Very sweet: probably too sweet for me. However it was as BITTER AS THE GRAVE compared to the pecan pie...I remember the recipe called for some obscene amount of light corn syrup, which I did find in Balaclava St, as well as molasses AND sugar. Honestly, none of use could stomach that pie. I ended up scraping off the sticky sugary pecans, rinsing and lightly salting them, then re-toasting as a less-sickly nut snack. Madness.

Halloween costumes: a few years ago (the night of the infamous Halloween Incident at Manly) I outdid myself in the costume department. I found some lady at Mt Gravatt selling her crappy old yellowed nylon-plastic wedding dress from the 80s, complete with plastic faded floral headpiece, veil (with cigarette burn holes!) and train, for 40 bucks. Gold. I splashed it with red paint and fake blood, powdered my face white, and went as a Murdered Bride. (We'll gloss over the fact that later, it ended up splashed with real blood as well. Halloween is a time for fake scariness...not real fear.)

Might try making some sugar skulls one day. I like how the name of the person they represent is painted on their foreheads: almost like a sweet voodoo embodiment of your loved ones.