New Halloween Traditions

Greg is excited!

 Halloween, in the past, was always an opportunity to carry out tradition in my family. Well, we'll really take anything and turn it in to a yearly tradition... New Year's Day Pismo Beach walks, birthday breakfasts in bed, Easter morning egg hunts, cinnamon bread toast on Christmas morning, and pumpkin carving on Halloween!! I have found that I am more into traditions than I thought, because Greg doesn't really care whether we do the same thing as last year or not :P But, we always have fun either continuing or making up different traditions for ourselves. This year, Greg and I get to make up any tradition we want, which is pretty cool, right?!
So this was our first Halloween celebration as a married couple.
In the last post you saw we had bought our pumpkin already. Until a couple days ago it had been donning our coffee table quite nicely. But we figured it was time to turn it into a more enhanced piece of art. I got us a little carving kit, we laid the newspaper out on our back patio (if I can call the strip of cement a back patio), and got to work!

Our tools all set to go

 Greg cut open the top and we both gutted our little pumpkin out.

Separating pumpkin guts and seeds...ewwww.

 We drew a nice face on him after coming to the joint agreement of goofy face over scary face this year.

Eyebrows :)

Here goes the carving!

Gerald, the finished product of our creativity!

 We were pretty proud of the result to say the least! We put Gerald on our kitchen table for a couple of  days, but once we could see the mold he was kicked outside. Luckily that day was Halloween!

Making pumpkin soup together (sorry to disappoint but not made with our real pumpkin).

 The pumpkin soup turned out pretty good. It was the first time ever making it and now we know what adjustments to make for next time :) But it was a tasty harvest time dinner with steamed veggies and cornbread.

Roasted pumpkin seeds were delicious! Greg finished this bowl that night :P

Us on Halloween night - Princess Leia and Han Solo

For our Halloween costumes Greg and I worked to collect pieces of our outfits all the way up to the 31st! But we finally found him that black vest and red-orange duct tape. We had a 40 minute struggle with my hairdo, but Greg was incredibly patient and finally helped me to do my hair really well. A youtube video told us to wrap each section of hair around a tube sock, then pin it in a circle. It was quite the hair party. I was pretty impressed with Greg's hair-styling skills after I told him to let the perfectionist in him chill out :P
The Star Wars theme was Greg's idea I think. We have been trying to watch straight through different movie series and we had started with the Star Wars six. That was all the inspiration we needed!
We had a great time with a couple from our Bible study, who live around the corner from us. We passed out candy, ate some candy, drank hot chocolate and watched some more pumpkin carving outside together with the neighbors. It was a really great time. We then, drove to Huntington Beach to the parents' house of Greg's friend Andy. Surrounding the bonfire pit on their front porch we passed the rest of the night away eating, drinking, and laughing with their family. It was a great night and a great first "holiday" being married :) We might try this again next year...