Happy Halloween!

 Today I brought some treats for my class at EBS, and before drilling the students on how to cite references in APA style, conducted a Halloween trivia quiz my colleague created. So now we all know that Halloween stands for "Hallow's Evening," "hallow" means "holy," and in the 9th century, the Christians moved their All Saints' Day holiday to be the day after the Celtic harvest festival, when the Gaels (living in the Scottish Highlands) would dress up as ghosts and goblins because they thought the dead might come back on October 31 and had to be scared away.

Michael was waiting for me to come home from work, eager to tell me a friend had invited him to go trick-or-treating with him in the next town over, and eager to get to carving our pumpkin.

While he was at soccer club, I finished carving the simple smiley jack-o-lantern Dad taught me to make as a kid. Then we rushed off to his friend Florian's house for the trick-or-treating. Michael wanted to be the Grim Reaper. My old witch dress worked well for that. Halloween in Germany is definitely for scary costumes because of course they have "Fasching" (or Carnival) to dress up as everything else. When I picked up Michael, I was given a paper towel holding a previously wobbly tooth that had fallen out over the course of the evening.

So our Halloween has come to an end, and we wish you a happy one!