Halloween and Life: The angels are in the details.

I was going to say "sometimes", but scratch that right away and I will say "quite often" the details in life are what make life good and even great.  Thinking about it, the big problems can really weigh you down day after day.  But they are always there.  We work on them slowly and they get better very gradually over time.  Problems with our personality such as learning to be patient.  Problems at home between parents that we have to work on all the time.  Addictions.  Sugar addiction (he says with a bar of chocolate next to him).  Alcohol addiction.  You can be clean for several years and then one day you have a drink and you get drunk and you have to start all over again.  Big problems are always with us and evolve and hopefully get better in the long run.

But it is the small NICE things which can make us happy and pick our mood up for the rest of the day.  And perhaps they are even more important for carrying us through day to day and making it worthwhile to get up in the morning.

I had not seen, let alone carved a jack o lantern for well, um, lets just say,  a couple decades.  My girls are kids now, not toddlers and for some reason we never carved a pumpkin before.  I don't know why not, go ask your Pop.  But this year my older girl got it in her head from some class at school that we should buy a pumpkin and carve it into a jack o lantern.  Novel idea indeed.

Pumpkin Soup

I have actually gotten used to the idea of pumpkin as a food.  My wife insisted that her Mother grow some pumpkins in her garden and my wife makes several types of pumpkin meals for the main dish, as well as two types of pumpkin soup.  So carving a pumpkin up for decorative and traditional purposes was in effect, new to me.  But I charged into the job with gusto.

Although I know now its not such "a biggie" the fact that we carved one tooth into the mouth was quite an accomplishment for which I gave myself a pat on the back.  My daughter was so excited by the process and the coming shape of the jack face.  We nearly messed up the teeth but rescued the plan and as I said got a tooth into it.   There was a lilt to his face, but that was due to the overall structure of the pumpkin and not due to our carving.

The end result was very fair to very nice but what was more important was it made my daughter so happy, she even congratulated me on a job well done and was quite enthralled to have a jack o lantern in our window.  Her reaction and joy was the most important to me.  I am not usually good at arts and crafts type activities so again I had to pat myself on the back on an all around success.

End Result

It wasn't such a big deal really, but in fact it made both of us really proud and happy.  Next year we will have to go for two or even three teeth as I hear that is the standard number of teeth in the Jack o Lantern.  Next year.   

General melee at the arts and crafts booth at the Mexican Halloween festival