Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Memories of Scottish Halloween (rutabaga lanterns) Catriona McPherson


HALLIE EPHRON: I first encountered Catriona McPherson as the author of a book entitled Dandy Gilver and the Proper Treatment of Bloodstains. LOVED her writing (tart, taut, funny), and I knew I'd follow her anywhere. She writes standalones and traditional mysteries, is a MULTI-award winner, and a generous soul who's served as president of Sisters in Crime.

Her new book, just out, Go to My Grave, is a Gothic thriller, set in a B&B in a rambling old house (be still my beating heart!) Estranged cousins reunite a decade after a 16th birthday party that started with peach schnapps and ended with a girl walking into the sea. Kirkus gave it a starred review and called it "a virtuoso explosion of guilt, remorse, and revenge."


So who better than Catriona, on Halloween eve, to share her memories of Halloween in Scotland?

CATRIONA MCPHERSON: How I love Halloween. I always did, from when I was a child.

Scottish Halloween has elements clearly related to American Halloween. Where you go trick-or-treating, we went “guising”. Literally “in disguise”, we traipsed around the neighbours’ houses asking for sweeties, but we had to earn them by performing a song or dance or reciting a poem. Some people let the kids off with telling a joke. Not the hard-liners.

The whole point of the performance – well, a useful by-product of the performance anyway – is that two hundred pounders home from college are too embarrassed to join in, which keeps the sweetie costs down marvelously. Mind you, if the adults don’t feel like taking part they don’t have to. We don’t have the toilet-paper revenge option if anyone’s too stingy to fork over a mini Mars Bar.

We always used to carve lanterns too. But we didn’t have
pumpkins, so we carved rutebagas (which we call turnips. They’re not the things English people call turnips. Those are swedes. The things English and American people call turnips, we call . . . wee purple turnips.)

There are two things to note about making jack-o-lanterns out of rutebagas. One, it’s a miracle any Scottish child gets to its teenage years with all ten fingers intact. (Have you ever tried to carve a rutabaga?) And two, the smell of a candle in a turnip is indescribable. The folk who moan about a whiff of pumpkin spice in Starbucks for a week or two (okay, a choking pall of pumpkin spice in every centre of commerce from Labor Day to Black Friday, but let’s not quibble) should count themselves lucky.

Where I used to live in Galloway, the farmers grew stubble turnips to feed the sheep in winter. The flock ate them right out there in the fields. Or rather they half-ate them and moved on. The smell of half a turnip in a muddy field, liberally wee-ed and pooped on by sheep, frozen and defrosted and refrozen again in the changeable weather . . . still smells better than a warm turnip lantern.

The other entertainments of a Scottish Halloween seem very low-key and wholesome compared with the Bacchanalia of an American one. (Full disclosure – I know them mostly from soaps and sitcoms. Maybe there’s less bloodshed and adultery in real life.) We dooked for apples. That is, we filled a baby bath with water, floated apples in it, kneeled down and tried to bite the apples out of the bath without drowning. Posh chidlren (or so I’ve heard) used to lean over the back of a chair and drop a fork into the bath to spear their apples. Less saliva but also less fun.

One of the mysteries of Halloween is why we worked so hard at it. We usually brought our apples back from school untouched every day. But on the 31st of October they were suddenly precious to us, and well worth half-drowning for. There were monkey nuts too. Do you call them monkey nuts? Peanuts in their shells. They were much easier to get out of the water, via a Moby Dick impersonation: head down, mouth wide, hoover them up like
plankton. The taste of a soaking wet peanut shell takes me right back to my mum’s kitchen, with our cat watching from her basket in feline outrage at the disturbance and my big sisters shouting at me “Swallow! Swallow! Mu-um! Catriona’s spitting in the dooking water!”

There are other traditional Halloween games. Scones coated all over in treacle could be hung from a string across the room for kids to try to eat without using their hands. We never did this in our house. I’m glad. I was the wee-est one and I know my sisters would have loved swinging the string to belt me in the face with a treacly bun and then complain to our mum that I was making everything sticky.

We did do the spell of peeling a tangerine in one long strip and throwing it over our shoulder to see the initial of the man we would marry. It was usually an S, tangerine skins being what they are and we would have good giggle about the Stephens and Scotts in our class at school (and Starsky (unfortunately not the cute one), Scott Baio (changed days, eh?) and did Woody from the Bay City Rollers count, since his real name was Stuart Wood?) The uselessness of this method was proved in later years by our husbands’ names: John, Greig, Tom and Neil.

I think those happy days of low-key bickering probably gave me some of the material for my new book, GO TO MY GRAVE. Eight kids – siblings and cousins – have spent twenty years trying to forget the aftermath of a birthday party that went seriously, disastrously wrong. When they find themselves back together again, the decades fall away along with all the tricks they’ve tried to keep the secrets of that night from ever surfacing.

Also, while I didn’t plan it like this – publishing is as mysterious to me as it ever was, twenty-odd books in – October is the perfect month to send GO TO MY GRAVE out into the world. It’s got a big old creepy house with far too many dark corners as well as all those secrets and all those lost children, grown-up now but not nearly over the past that ties them together. BOO!

HALLIE: Honoring Halloween, what are you cherished memories of Halloweens past? Pumpkin carving? Setting out a scarecrow? Dunking (dooking!) for apples? Putting together a 'haunted house' with bowls of Jell-o and cold spaghetti and peeled grapes to feel blindfolded? TRICK OR TREAT!

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70 comments:

  1. Congratulations, Catriona, on your new book . . . “Go To My Grave” sounds like a perfect book for the Halloween season and I’m looking forward to reading it.

    The best part of Halloween when we were kids was making our costumes and then trick-or-treating with the other kids in the neighborhood . . . .

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    1. Thank you, Joan. I don't remember our costumes being very enterprising: ghosts mostly.

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    2. Ballerina and angel were always good choices. So was a crayon . . . .

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  2. I went trick-or-treating as a kid, and I have to say, it sounds a lot easier than guising! I have carved pumpkins before too, although not well. Never tried carving a rutabaga, but now I'm curious to try, if only to experience what one smells like (although it sounds like I might regret that part). So interesting to compare the traditions in different countries. I'm looking forward to reading your new book, Catriona!

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  3. I don't know that I have any real special memories of Halloween as a kid. It was pretty much the same thing each year. Get a costume (sometimes there was creativity, sometimes it was a store bought costume), and go out around the neighborhood collecting a bunch of candy. I was never much for haunted houses or horror movies so the "get the crap scared out of you" aspect didn't drive my desires either.

    As a teenager once I wasn't allowed to go out (in my house, 13 was the last year you were allowed to go out for candy), I had nothing to do with the day.

    Of course now as an adult, I'm the one giving out candy at the house. I have 4 giant bags of candy to pass out to the 2-3 hundred kids that will come to my door (my neighborhood is a drop off point and I've had people from as far away as four towns coming to my door). I also give out comic books and special prizes for great costumes.

    Of course, there are always little brats who try to ruin the fun of the evening and about 5 years ago one such little troublemaker inspired me (along with other fun destroyers) to make up a list of rules. 4 for parents, 9 for kids. I get the occasional chuckle from others when they read the rules. It also confirms that I'm well on my way to "cranky old man" status.

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    1. Jay, your Halloween sounds wonderful! I think it's much more fun to give candy than get it, and I can't imagine having two or three hundred kids!!

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    2. Love the idea of giving comic books and special prizes, Jay. Sounds like your house is very popular!

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    3. Oh, Jay - I'd be the first kid lined up at your house. Sounds as if you really get into it. Now you have to give us Jay's Rules for How Not to Misbehave at Halloween...

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  4. Catriona, the book sounds fabulous, and how clever of your publisher to put it out just before Halloween! Since I'm in London I'll have to buy it on my Kindle to get myself in the Halloween mood.

    My childhood Halloween's were fun but not terribly exciting. We carved Jack o Lanterns and went trick or treating with friends in the neighborhood. I think my fondest Halloween memories are grownup ones. Our house has a big front porch with porch swings. My mother loved to come and sit on the porch with me on Halloween night and give out candy. She loved to see the kids in costumes, which is funny because she was rubbish at making them herself.

    This year I think there will be Jack o Lanterns burning outside the pubs and shops on Earl's Court Road, so I'm looking forward to that!

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    1. It's out in London too, Deb! Same title, different cover.

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  5. Oh my goodness, this was a great post! I cannot say that I have ever carved a turnip/rutebaga, even though I lived in Europe for 10 years. I have made small Jack o' lanterns out of oranges. That was tricky!
    I do hope I am able to read this new book soon. I love a good thriller!

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    1. And sticky too, I bet. What is the smell of a burning orange, I wonder.

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  6. What a fun post, and I can't wait to read the new book, Catriona! I love costumes and candles in the dark, not to mention candy, so Halloween has always been a favorite holiday. In lieu of scones we tied doughnuts to strings and tried to grab bites. Made candied apples. Of course we carved pumpkins, and counter to your stinky turnips, I love the smell of pumpkin flesh. With no littles around and living with a Halloween grinch, these days I mostly just carve one pumpkin and hand out candy, always praying one of those princesses with the long skirt won't trip on my front steps. But if I'm invited to an adult Halloween party? Sometimes I put on the black puffy wig, my pointy glasses, lots of makeup, mesh tights, a short tight skirt, and scrounge a cigarette somewhere. The old alter ego comes out!

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    1. Remember when there were 'candy cigarettes'? Now I gather they're no longer made, for obvious reasons.

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    2. I do remember! Back when smoking was seen as glamorous...

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    3. They really are the same traditions, with different rates of survival, eh? And re. the cigs - them, cigars, coconut tobacco. Actually, See's Candy here in California stil lsells chocolate cigars.

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    4. See’s. Reason enough to move back to California

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    5. See's tempts this California native often!

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  7. Catriona, as well you know, I read GO TO MY GRAVE the day it came out, in two evenings. I would have read it in one sitting, but it's like hallowe'en cand, have to make the good stuff last more than a day. I'm not sure which of your books are my favorites, but this is near the top of the list, maybe right after THE DAY SHE DIED and A REEK OF RED HERRINGS.

    Julie and I still leave each other feathers in untoward places, just to hear the other shriek, and we now give a wide berth to those "live" creches at Christmas.

    My dear, you couldn't write a dull laundry list if you tried, never mind a dull bewk. I treasure your work and your friendship greatly, and I hope to see you soon, perhaps in Vancouver.

    Love from the queen of all stalkers

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    1. Awwww. I love that one of my books has become a sweet little sneezepassiveagressivesneeze game at your place!

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  8. congratulations on your new book! Ordinary Halloweens until my older kids both were born Halloween week and we had two birthday parties with Halloween in between! The manic high lasted the entire month.

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    1. Wow. With cake icing added to the cnady that must have been some sugar-high!

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  9. Welcome Catriona--love your descriptions of Halloween, and the sound of the new book! My mother happened to love rutabagas, and now I do too. But they are fiercely hard to peel and chop--I can't imagine carving them!!

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    1. I like them, too - really they're just hairy overgrown turnips, They're impossible to CUT never mind carve out the inside. But boy do they look creepy.

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    2. Rutabagas are a standard winter veg here. I put them in th microwave a couple of minutes to soften them up for peeling and cutting up. Otherwise I’d lose a finger

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    3. I eat them regularly and I wonder aloud about how we ever scraped out a lantern when we were wee. GENIUS tip, Ann!

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  10. Welcome Catriona! You know I am a huge end infinitely devoted fan— and you are new book is absolutely terrific. My favorite passed memory of Halloween? Throwing out all the raisins and apples from people who insisted they were better than Snickers. Pub-leeze. And the pointy princess had my mom made me out of silver posterboard, with the floaty pink scarf coming out of the tippety top. I wore that four weeks. Until it fell apart.
    My contemporary Halloween memories, one of them at least, is when Jonathan and I went as the arc’s. I was Joan, and he was Noah.
    Now, off to buy twizzlers!.

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    1. Past memory, not passed. Dictating again, obviously.

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    2. And that is supposed to be puh-leeze. Auto correct and I are battling it out at the airport.

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    3. Exactly! Apples are no kind of prize!

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  11. Catriona, I love reading anything you write - sure you give me a chuckle. Okay, maybe not the books, but you know what I mean. I can't wait to read GO TO MY GRAVE.

    Good Halloween memories? I don't know as I have any. My parents always made us kids (4) pool the Halloween candy, and my younger siblings took all the good stuff (any objections on my part were quashed because I was "older" and "should understand" - bah). And in Buffalo, your Halloween costume always had to fit over a snowsuit, or you'd freeze, and I've never been a fan of tramping around in the cold.

    I guess my recent Halloweens are the best: Where I sit in front of a fire, all warm and toasty, drinking mulled cider while my teenagers pass out the candy to the few trick-or-treaters who come to the door.

    Mary/Liz

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    1. Hmmmmm, I never saw things from the other end of the pecking order, Liz. I am rethinking my hard-done-by assumptions now.

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  12. This is reminding me of when we had to throw away any candy that wasn't wrapped. Those 'happy days' when miscreants hid razor blades in apples... or maybe that was an urban myth?

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    1. It seems to have been replaced by the black-cat-being-sacrificed myth. People warn me to keep my black cat close but every time I "snopes" it it seems there' no documented eviedence. I suppose stories are part of Halloween.

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    2. Back during the razor blade scare I gave out nickels. That was when you could actually buy a candy bar for a nickel.

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  13. Hi-ya Catriona! My copy of Go To My Grave arrived yesterday! I made myself a pot of coffee, plopped down in my favorite chair and only stopped reading when I dozed off. (I would be interested to see your floor plan for the Breakers.) No particular childhood memories of Halloween with the exception of a self-made princess costume that was indeed too long!

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    1. Oh, you better believe I've got one. I'll dig it out and get it up on Fb, Lyda

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  14. I'm afraid I am not a fan of Halloween at all. Can't think of one thing I like about it although I always do like to see kids having a good time. Probably the biggest reason i don't like it is when I was teaching everyone was encouraged to dress up, which was fine, but then the entire day wound up being a big party and the kids were stuffed with candy.
    Oh, and the smell involved with pumpkin carving makes me sick!
    But I was happy to read here that I am not the only one that thinks (thought) rutabagas were turnips. I loved mashed rutabagas and were very surprised to see what an actual turnip was.

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  15. Darkness is coming way too early these days--but perfect timing for a great gothic tale--time to break out the hot chocolate, a blanket, and your book!

    Favorite Halloween memories involve taking the boys trick or treating when they were little guys and the time I helped some friends pass out their candy--the saddest little cowboy you ever saw came to the door with his mom. 'My brother is sick,' he said, lower lip quivering. It seems Halloween just wasn't the same without his sidekick!

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    1. That's heart-breaking. Let's turn it Halloweeny: next his mother says "He's an only child". And the little cowboy smiles knowingly and walks away looking at you over his shoulder. What next?

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    2. Well, he did get extra candy! :-)

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  16. Catriona, the rutabaga tale is priceless and Go To My Grave sounds terrific. Thanks for getting my day off to a hilarious start.

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    1. I'm almost tempted to try it again. We've got power tools out in the workshop these days . . .

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  17. Congrats on the new book, Catriona! Carving a rutabaga sounds extremely hazardous; is that still the practice?

    Halloween was really all about the candy to me, and my most vivid Halloween memory is when our cocker spaniel got into our sweets and blew up like a balloon. She was okay, but we never left our candy out again!

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    1. Maybe for some traditionalists. Scotland always had Halloween. American Halloween migrated to England and that has started spreading north. If I was a Scottish kid these days, I'd insist on a pumpkin.

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  18. Best with the book, Catriona! Loved the memories of a Scottish Halloween. I have to say you gave me pause with the rutabaga. The first time I tried to cut one (for a stew) I ended by giving it to my husband to cut on the band-saw. Cannot imagine carving one! Give me a pumpkin - Give me paint! Call me chicken - I'm OK with that.

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  19. Catriona, you always make me laugh, thank you! So looking forward to Go To My Grave, but delaying reading it so I don't have as long until your next book.

    My favorite "holiday" is Halloween, largely because of the costumes. Even as a kid I would spend days planning not just my own, but my siblings' costumes, as well, and make them for us all. My children got the benefit of that, too. We have never bought costumes, except bits and pieces of them.

    I always wondered about the rutabaga lanterns. Using pumpkins is definitely a New World improvement!

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    1. Right? About the cost. I once saw a striped skirt (maybe for a wild west hooker - ahem showgirl) in a costume place and reckoned I'd wear it for real with a black top (to an Agatha banquet, for instance). It was $240!!!

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    2. Except you never actually said anything about the cost. (I am so unskilled with a needle I can't think of any other reason to force myself to make something.)

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    3. When I was a kid, it was cost, plus lack of much in the way of costumes. Everything was highly flammable and gross, and my mother would not tolerate the idea of buying such wasteful stuff.

      Then I started making all my own clothes, and all my kids' clothes, too, including costumes.

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  20. Loved reading this, Catriona. I can hear your voice telling the stories. Favorite memory? We never bought costumes as kids. I'm sure it was a money issue. Instead my clever mother filled a "dress up" box all year and we put our creativity to work.My other favorite is taking my own small kids trick or treating and younger one, at 3, (Nov. 2 birthday) eating the candy through the wrappings before we got home!

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  21. NOT ONLY am I going to spend Halloween [Samhuain] in Scotland this year, but I just this week hung out at the MacPherson museum in Newtonmore, way up in the highlands. Since the Jungle Reds have never steered me wrong with a book recco, and since I am typing this whilst cruising on wifi in Blackstones in Edinburgh, it's going to be easy to support Catriona by buying her book. Congratulations, Catriona -- can't wait to make you my next Tartan Noir fave!

    ~kc

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    1. Now, here's the question. While at the McPherson museum, did you leaf through the "McPhersons of Note" collection. Because I'm in there!

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  22. I'm just going to point out pumpkins are not that difficult to grow. If they flourish here in Maine, they can do so in Scotland.

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    1. Hmmmmmm. What's a warm summer's day in Maine? If it hits 75 in Scotland we all go to the beach.

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  23. Oh Catriona, I love Halloween and you being here today to give it a Scottish flavor is such a treat. It was indeed perfect timing for Go to My Grave to come out in October. As you know by my review and promoting it, I loved this book. Congratulations on another successful stand-alone! And, of course, I love your lighter side in the Dandy Gilver and Lexy Campbell series. Thanks for the Scottish version of Halloween. I can't imagine not having pumpkins though.

    I love, love, love Halloween! It's my favorite time of the year, and I do decorate for it, usually having my decorations up by the end of September. I want it to last as long as possible. Growing up, Halloween was a magical time, dressing up and going out with your neighborhood friends to houses where you knew the inhabitants and they knew you. It was a group activity, one we anticipated with great excitement and reveled in when the day finally arrived. Our parents seemed to be pretty jolly about it, too. There was one boy who usually came over from another part of the town, the child of friends of my parents, and he always went with us trick-or-treating. I have a great picture of the two of us one Halloween when he was Casper the Friendly Ghost, with one of those plastic masks. That's been well over 50 years ago, and I saw him recently in my hometown, and we reminisced over those Halloween. It was always great fun to get home with our loot and empty it out, admiring all the yummy candy we had scored. There was always a street party downtown, but we rarely went by it. It had blaring music that I think my parents wanted to avoid. I don't think I really got into pumpkin carving until I had my own kids, and my daughter has continued that with her family. I miss out on the kids trick-or-treating at our house, as we live in a less populated part of the community, where it is hard for the kids to walk. I do keep candy just in case a straggler shows up.

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    1. Kathy, you reminded me of what it was like AFTER. Sitting on the floor with my sister and emptying out our pillow cases full of candy and trading. We often had 3 pumpkins- one for each daughter to carve and one for my husband, the master carver.

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    2. My plan for tomorrow teatime is to sit outside my beloved Mishka's coffee shop in downtown Davis and watch all the little Elsas and Cap'n Jacks tripping around the shops.

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    3. Oh yes, Hallie, the counting and trading was an important part of the evening. Catriona, they changed trick-or-treating to today here and in the immediate area. It's supposed to rain tomorrow, so I'm guessing that's the reason.

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  24. Congrats on the book release, Catriona! I love a good domestic thriller and this sounds perfect. I had great nostalgic chuckles out of your post - some very similar childhood memories here - also, Scottish Halloween sounds like loads of fun!

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  25. Catriona, you should write a book of essays about growing up in Scotland. So funny! We didn't do trick or treat when I was growing up in England only dunking for apples and apples in a string, I think. I can't remember much. Not a big feast especially with Guy Fawkes only a few days later, which was more fun with fireworks and sausages

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