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May 01, 2010

Hellllooooo!

We had a little family Samhein celebration this evening (would have done it last night, only the kids were staying at their grandparents). So, it was Halloween, Kiwi style. And for us, more about having a seasonal celebration based on the end of the harvest season rather than on a "date", and definitely not about the commercial side of it.

As we go about our days we have been noticing that the gardens and flowering plants are dying back, that the chickens are no longer laying due to the shorter days, chilly mornings with mostly warm days still, plenty of falling leaves, the harvesting of the pumpkins and beans is now over and we start to settle in for the winter days that are slowly but surely getting closer. We embrace the coming winter by looking forward to the cold days snuggled in front of the roaring fire reading books, playing games or drawing. Meals start to move away from summer meals to those of comforting crockpot meals, hot soups and puddings. In the last few days I've been picking feijoas off the ground and we've been enjoying them as a snack or in hot puddings.

We started off with bobbing for apples. A few weeks ago I took the kids apple picking which is quickly becoming a lovely autumn ritual we look forward to (these apples weren't from that picking, but the activity seemed fitting).

Nathan then came up with an idea...


Danielle then came up with an idea...

Dinner was a lovely pumpkin and kumara soup.

Simon carved out a pumpkin following Nathan's design...

Followed with an apple and feijoa crumble.

4 comments:

Leanne said...

Looks like fun, so where are the photos of mum & dad bobbing?
James likes the pumpkin carving.


Love Leanne

Nik said...

LOL, well, I tried bobbing but no one took a photo (and I gave up, wasn't so keen on the wet nose lol). Simon was still at work when we did it and he declined upon getting home in favour of carving the pumpkin and having a beer instead hehe.

Stephanie said...

Looks wonderful to me.
Bobbing for apples is great. And harvesting. But I'm not ready to think about that yet!!

Leanne said...

I was the only one in the family that couldn't get an apple much to their disgust! shhh