Tag Archives: Halloween

8 ways to confuse trick-or-treaters

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My favourite quotes from Halloweens-past have got to be:

“Could I have money instead?”

And, “I don’t like those sweets. Have you got any other ones?”

[I mean, seriously, do I look like a pick’n’mix store?]

Then this morning, my overexcited youngest son and his best mate sung a little ditty to me:

Trick-or-treat, trick-or-treat
Give me all your yummy sweets! (repeat)

I really hope they’re politer than that when they go knocking on doors tonight, seeking their annual candy windfall.

Screen Shot 2015-10-31 at 15.16.42So, in a tongue-in-cheek spirit, here are 10 ways to turn the tables on the trick-or-treaters:

– Give away something other than candy (bags of sand, empty water bottles, golf balls, packs of oatmeal).

– Get everyone who comes to the door to come in and see if they can figure out what’s wrong with your washing machine. Tell them it makes a strange banging noise and your maid’s away.

– Stick a ‘Beware of the Lion’ sign on your door.

– Install a motion sensor that turns off the porch light every time a festively dressed child approaches.

– Hand out menus to the trick-or-treaters with pencils and let them order their candy by candlelight. Give them a bill at the end. Any complaints – throw your hands in the air, shrug and say, inshallah.

– Answer the door dressed as a dentist and give out toothbrushes. Treat them to a lecture about tooth decay.

– Get about 30 people to wait in your living room. When older kids come trick-or-treating in their normal clothes, say, “Come in.” When they do, have everyone yell, “Surprise!!!” Act like it’s a surprise party.

Happy Halloween everyone!

Halloween for grown-ups

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Every year I do a Halloween post. All about how much fun the kids have trick-or-treating in Dubai. Since this weekend has unofficially been dubbed Halloween weekend here, I’m publishing this post early – and, this year, it’s not about all the fun stuff laid on for the children.

It’s about Halloween at work, for fully grown adults.

So, this morning, I walk out the elevator and see bloody handprints on the linoleum. My eyes follow the scarlet trail to the door and, lo and behold, through the glass I see a body, lying inside the entrance foyer – a wild-haired killer clown (who I later find out is one of the editors) sprawled out on the floor. He’s twitching like a beheaded chicken.

xxx

Stony silence: Sales? Subscriptions?

I, myself, am clutching an axe, borrowed from Son2. Shoving my own hair into a ponytail, I don my mask and brandish my axe, the bones of my knuckles showing white.

I hear the sound of a knife-like instrument on glass.

Scrape, scrape.

(A little bit like fingernails on a blackboard).

Then a blood-curdling scream.

The door opens and the full candle-lit Halloween horror scene is revealed, complete with a knife-wielding intergalactic alien, cackling witches and a (rather sexy) pirate.

Another shriek.

Followed by laughter (heh-heh-heh).

This is clearly going to be no ordinary day at work.

In the kitchen, where I always go first to make tea, there’s a severed hand in the fridge – and though I know it’s not real, I push the fridge door shut firmly, smiling to myself that our workplace has become just like The Office TV show with Halloween gags and pranks.

A few minutes later, the procession of zombies and ghouls filtering into work is joined by a slightly tubby gravestone, who saunters around the office for, oooh, at least half an hour. No-one knows who he is (sales, perhaps?). He does a jolly good job sneaking up behind me, his hands enveloping my neck in a chilling grip as I’m caught unawares.

“But who on earth is he?” I say to my friend afterwards. “Is he going to walk round all day, d’you think?”

(After 30 minutes, it’s becoming quite amusing that he’s in no hurry at all to sit down and do any work.)

He comes back round with treats, and I take a shortbread dismembered finger – still none the wiser as to his identity.

The mystery was only solved later in the day, when we found out he’d been hired as entertainment – a tombstone-o-gram!

Who says the annual revelry is all about the kids?

Mwahahaha!

A sweet, spidery treat for DH (aka the cesspit)

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Tuesday’s image is a photo from Halloween. My DH loves pumpkin pie. While he was away, I attempted to make it, with the fleshy innards of the pumpkin we’d carved. I then got a bit carried away and made raisin-spiders by pulling cotton through to make legs. Yes, there should be 8 legs, but it was 11pm, and I was sewing raisins. Clearly I’d lost my mind! My DH’s verdict: looks like a medieval cesspit.

Tuesday’s image is a photo from Halloween. My DH loves pumpkin pie. While he was away, I attempted to make it, with the fleshy innards of the pumpkin we’d carved. I then got a bit carried away and made raisin-spiders by pulling cotton through to make legs. Yes, there should be 8 legs, but it was 11pm, and I was sewing raisins. Clearly I’d lost my mind! My DH’s verdict: looks like a medieval cesspit.

Halloween part 2

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If you saw my last post, you might remember the photo I posted of a polite note on someone’s door, asking treat-or-treaters not to ring the bell. Here it is again, in case you didn’t see it:

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A lovely reader sent me a funny photo of the Scottish version of this note, which I’m posting here with an ‘excuse the language!’ footnote. Thank you Teresa for the laugh!

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PS – Do ‘like’ my Facebook page (above right), if you haven’t done so already! I promise it won’t spam your timeline and I’m trying to populate the page with some fun stuff (while enjoying some chit-chats too). Thank you! x

Halloween in the Hood

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The witching hour has begun. I’ve raced home from work like a demon, the neighbourhood is aglow with orange lanterns and the boys are dressed up and on the sugar again.

It can only be Halloween – alive and kicking in Dubai, thanks to the significant number of American expats. And because we live in a compound of families, trick-or-treaters practically line up at our door.

In the Muslim world, beings called jinn - or genies - are believed to exist. Paranormal citings in the UAE are considered not to be connected to people who have passed away, but to these entirely separate beings. Citings of jinn are said to be common in Nad Al Sheba, the ‘haunted’ Jazira Al Hamrat village in Ras Al Kaimah, and Jumeirah.

The first year we were here, we ran out of goodies and ended up handing out juice boxes, cheese, apples, bananas, sandwiches – anything! The cupboards looked like they’d been ransacked.

This year, we know what to do – panic buy candy as though preparing for nuclear war, dole it out in rationed portions, then when it’s all gone, turn the porch light out and hide.

BB and LB are in their element, of course. Our preparations started a week ago with costume planning. The Little Boy was easy – I grabbed a spiderboy outfit from our local supermarket which he loved.

Not interested in a big reveal tonight, he’s worn it to bed every night and nearly all weekend too (his face was a picture when we walked into the Halloween bash at the Madinat to find at least six other spiderboys in exactly the same red-and-blue outfit).

The Big Boy was harder. I’ve mentioned before he likes trains – a lot – and so he decided he’d go as a ghost train. He drew me an elaborate illustrated diagram then tested me on it. “Do ghosts have teeth?” he asked, picturing in his mind some kind of monster-ghost hybrid.

Pammy the Pumpkin

In the end, we settled on a glow-in-the dark skeleton outfit from OshKosh, which he’s wearing with his pilot’s hat and a set of handcuffs that went to school this week for show-and-tell.

We’ve even decorated: DH planted a skull in the flowerbed and dangled a one-armed skeleton in the porchway. But, I have to say, I’m rather proud of the pumpkin the boys and I carved yesterday. Just a small attempt on my part to redress the boy/girl ratio in this household. She’s rather pretty, no?

Postscript: Halloween’s over!
Now 10pm, the streets are quiet, the Halloweenies all in bed. As predicted, the doorbell didn’t stop ringing, and I practically had to retrieve the boys from the ceiling they were so high on e-numbers. Some highlights I’m still laughing about:

The boys collected enough candy to last all year - this tired mummy is about to steal some

– The drive-by trick-or-treaters: a quad bike pulling a six-foot trailer loaded with revellers

– The teenagers who got in on the act

– Piling our candy on a tray, only to regret it when kids started grabbing the stuff. “I’ll have that one, that one and that one….”

– Hearing about last year’s egging at the Ranches (really? It’s hardly the wrong side of Dubai)

– “I don’t like these. Have you got anything else?” (Who do you think we are? The pick ‘n’ mix stall?)

– “Could we have money instead?”