Halloweeeeeeeeen!

Halloween in Norway is definitely not as big as in the US, but it is still celebrated. People have parties and dress up, and some children (only young kids, no teenagers) go trick or treating. One thing they don't do though is.......CARVE PUMPKINS! So of course I had to introduce this to my family :)

Anyways, October 31st we all woke up early to get ready for the day. The first thing we did was bake a pumpkin pie. Yes I know pumpkin pie is usually eaten on Thanksgiving not Halloween, but we had an extra pumpkin to make one from. So we figured, why not try? Now I have never made a pumpkin pie from a real pumpkin, we usually just buy it at the store, so this was taking a real chance. We had no idea how it was going to turn out.

Here are pictures to show the cooking process:

Scooping the seeds out of the pumpkin

Cooking the pumpkin on the stove

Making the dough for the pie crust

The pumpkin is cooked :) Then we had to skin it.

Then we blended the skinless pumpkin and got this (which is what is used to make the pie)

Looks yummy right? haha nope, it smells sooooo gross!

And finally the pie, going into the oven (and this does look good)

While is was cooking we decided to CARVE PUMPKINS! Wooohooooo.

Before we started:

As you might already know, the first step to carve a pumpkin is to cut a whole in the top so that you can scoop all the gooey yucky seeds and stuff out. Let me tell you, the inside of a pumpkin feels quite slimey and gross, but of course I made my family and Vanessa take all that good stuff out with their hands. xD How nice of me haha. Here are some pictures:

Me and Vanessa

Ingvild and Hanna

Did you notice the gooey stuff in the bowl in the picture above? Thats what we were taking out. So after we finished emptying out pumpkins we got to begin carving them. This is of course the fun part :) First we drew on them with a pen though so we would know where to carve.

Everyone drawing and carving:

Here is one of our finished pumpkins:

Vanessas pumpkin (which she wanted to keep forever, until I told her it would rot ha)

After we finished carving the pumpkin pie was finished.

And me tasting it:

And yay! It was just as good as at home :) Job well done.

After that Javi, Chiara, Vanessa and me had a few hours to spare before all our friends came over for the party. We started getting the food ready and putting on our costumes.

This is a total joke haha:

Before we put our costumes on we made the dough for the pizza though.

Chiara, Blake, Ellen and Vanessa

Javi and me just watched

Yum yum

Then we put the dough in a big bowl to sit and get bigger. While this was happening we put on our costumes. We didnt really have much time to decide what we wanted to be, so me and Javi came up with something really quickly. We decided to be fat Americans. Yes I know this is a really bad was to represent my country, but it was fun. Here are our finished costumes:

Chiara painted our faces for us, it was really good.

Here is Vanessa, she was supposed to be a scarecrow, but she kind of looks like someone who escaped from prison

Chiara was a nice girl on one side of her face and evil on the other side:

And finally all of us:

Then we were ready to make pizza and for some friends to show up.

The dough after waiting 2 hours

Making pizza

Finished pizza :)

Oh I forgot here is a picture of the table before everyone arrived and we ate and everything: it looks really nice

And our pumpkins outside, they were awesome!

Getting ready to go trick or treating. Here in Norway they say "knask eller knep" I hope this is right cause I dont remember exactly! Oops...

Now for more pictures of everyones costumes:

Brenda:

Lisa, quite a creative costume I thought

Inger-Lise:

Anna:

I absolutely loved her contacts, so awesome, kind of creepy too haha. Anne is supposed to be someone who drowned.

After dinner we played sing star ABBA. It was pretty fun, I usually refuse to sing at home but here I actually sang. Then we watched Friday the 13th and had cake, pie and ice cream.

And here is the cake just because I thought it was adorable:

After the movie we all hung out and talked for awhile. Everybody was gone by 2am and my parents came home from the concert they were at at about the same time.

I really enjoyed Halloween and having some friends over. It was a really good night. It was also really nice having little kids come to the door trick or treating. There definitely weren't as many as back home, and they were all young. I do miss going out with all my friends trick or treating at home though. And I miss the American candy, haha. Butterfingers, reeses, skittles, tootsie rolls, etc. My mom here told me that they will carve pumpkins every year now probably, and Vanessa wants to do it back home in Italy. I think that is awesome, it was fun to share some of my culture.

:)