Ha-Ha-Halloween

Stephen and I watched Tim Burton's clay animation movie "The Nightmare before Christmas" with my friends the weekend before Halloween so now whenever I think of the word halloween it has to be sung like it is in the movie ... "Ha-ha-halloween".

I don't usually celebrate Halloween but my friends and I began a pumpkin carving tradition last year that we have decided to continue for our Bible Study. I read an article that compared carving a pumpkin with how God works with us. The gist of it is that He picks us out of the dirt of the pumpkin patch, removes the yucky stuff and the seeds of fear, hate and pride from our hearts, puts a smile of joy on our face and puts His light inside us. So we got together the week before halloween to carve our pumpkins. We had one extra because when we were picking out our pumkins we found a very quirky lumpy little pumpkin that we fell in love with. He looked like a little old man and we named him Joe. He's the first one on the left in the picture. My pumpkin is the one on the right.

For Halloween night, Stephen and I volunteered at the church with our friends Sally and Michelle. Our church teamed up with McKenzie Towne Hall across the traffic circle to have a place for kids to go and play games and have activities after trick-or-treating or instead of trick-or-treating. We manned several of the games and had a lot of fun. The kids coming through in their costumes were very adorable. Stephen was in charge of a station where kids stood on either side of the table and tried to blow out a candle with water guns. The first one to get their candle out won. If they won they were then allowed to squirt Stephen with the water gun. Needless to say, that was a popular game. We were exhausted by the end of the evening trying to keep up with all the very excited kids. But it was fun.