I’m going to state the obvious here: holidays are fun. Some are nothing more than a day to skip work and get paid for it (I’m looking at you, Family Day), but others prompt people to pull out all the stops and celebrate harder than parents do when their kid finally learns to wipe his/her own keister (if you’re a parent, you’ll understand. If not, just imagine how awesome that moment would be). Easter is dope. Christmas is cool. But nothing really comes close to the glory that is Halloween. Except they don’t really celebrate Halloween in South Africa.
*record scratch.
You heard me. South Africans are content to just let October 31 slip on by like any other day. Talk about a giant wasted opportunity. No decorations. No dressing up like a slutty cop. Like a slutty unicorn. Like a slutty table. Like a slutty doughnut. Like a slutty Donald Trump. Like a slutty…well, you get the idea.
Like, I understand why having a bunch of people running around in masks at night and knocking on strangers’ doors MIGHT not turn out so well in South Africa, but on the flip side, hey- free candy. Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Anyway, we figured that as long as there’s not really Halloween in South Africa, we’d show them how it works.
Warning: there’s gonna be a lot of pictures ahead. And most of them will be of food. So maybe don’t read this if you’re hungry. This is my most Martha Stewart-y blog post to date (the version of Martha Stewart that spends ridiculous amounts of time making trivial little things around the house that exist solely to make other people feel lazy. Not the cooler version of Martha Stewart who spent her time stabbing other inmates with bedazzled homemade shanks (at least I assume that’s how she spent her time in prison. I’ll admit I didn’t really fact check that last part)).
I could have just invited a couple people over, told them to wear costumes, and chucked some crappy candies in some plastic bowls. COULD have. But I’ve mentioned before that birthday parties in South Africa are over the top. I couldn’t have Halloween in South Africa be a disappointment.
Unfortunately, we were super tied up the weekends before and after Halloween because we’re incredibly popular and awesome, and I also lie a lot, and we just couldn’t time it right. So we had a late Halloween party, which is a huge faux pas in North America, but nobody here knows that. Well, like, until just now, that is.
To make the party a success, I decided to put in more effort than I’ve put into anything in my life (if my kids turn out crappy, you know why. I involved myself more for one event than I have cumulatively being a parent in their entire lives).
First things first- we needed candy apples. Cause in North America, we don’t do healthy stuff without completely obliterating all the nutritional value. But I couldn’t have regular candy apples, like our ancestors, the dinosaurs ate. I needed something cool. Like black, bleeding heart candy apples.
To make these apples look not lame, I needed to make them black. Have you ever seen black candy apples? Me neither. But I did know where I could buy some black food colour gel.
Luckily for me, I had some help in the kitchen.
Promptly after I finished dipping the apples in the black shell, I dropped my candy thermometer, which broke into a kabillionty little pieces. Getting the sugar to exactly the right temperature is kind of critical, so I needed to go buy another one before I could begin the next step. Luckily, there’s a Baker’s Bin not too far away, so it wasn’t too long until I could do this:
Once the red shell was ready, the Kraken and I spooned some on top of each apple. And…
The apples surprisingly didn’t turn out awful. But there’s more to a Halloween party than some dope looking candy apples.
I needed some other icky treats as well.
Popcorn is OK. But not OK enough. So I boiled up some corn syrup, castor sugar, butter, green food colouring, vanilla, baking soda, and love.
When that was looking gross enough, it was time to dump it over the naked popcorn and bake the crap out of it.
The only thing left was to bag the gooey stuff up.
I love it when a plan works out. But I still needed more.
Turning boring eggs into cool eggs was super simple. I hard boiled them in water with green food colouring in it. When they were done, I cracked the shells (but didn’t peel them) and dumped them back into the coloured water for a bunch of hours.
But nobody wants to just eat weird hard boiled eggs. So I deviled them.
They turned out kind of cool, but I’ll probably never do that again. It turns out cutting an olive in half for the body, cutting the other half in half again, and then cutting each of THOSE halves into four tiny little legs is a lot of painfully tedious work.
People were going to start arriving in less than an hour, but I figured I had enough time to make cheesy witch bread fingers. I was mostly right. I didn’t have enough minutes to paint the nails black like I wanted to, but what I had would have to do.
While I was doing all this, my long-suffering wife- who puts up with way more of my crap than she should- made the house look Halloween-y.
It turns out I’m not bad at documenting party prep, but I’m absolute rubbish at taking pictures of actual parties. Cause I’ve got nothing. But I CAN tell you it was a boatload of fun.
Thanks to everyone who popped by- next year will be even bigger and better. Halloween in South Africa is now a thing.
Here are a couple more pictures of the apples, cause a) I dig them, and b) this is my blog and I can do whatever I want.
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Nice! I don’t even go that far here!
You are adding to the notoriety of that home!
Good Stuff guys!
Ray
Hey man! Great to hear from you! Seeing this makes me remember I saw an email I didn’t reply to…
The party was definitely a good time- bigger and better next year!
I love all of it! Very creative. I am one who, ahem, doesn’t actually like Halloween. It seems like so much work for terrible food and having to dress up. At least in SA you’re not also freezing your butt off. By the way, am I right to be freaked out about that toilet in that picture for other creepy reasons? Maybe I’m getting the back story wrong…
You don’t like Halloween???? I USED to have so much respect for you…
Haha…close. But this is one of the downstairs bathrooms. We left the upstairs one alone.
They should have made The Grinch about me. I’m not a fan of any of the holidays. Christmas is so much work! I get it, Halloween is much less work, but I also hate decorating, including on my own person. The only holiday I subscribe to, and only be cause we are German and therefore have NO FAMILY coming for it, is Thanksgiving. A weekend of sitting around watching TV and having a roaring fire and eating great food.
I mean, I guess we’re all entitled to our own choices EVEN IF THOSE CHOICES MEAN YOU’RE A TERRIBLE HUMAN BEING HOW CAN YOU NOT LIKE CHRISTMAS?!?!?!?!
I always end up liking it AFTER THE FACT. But there is so much to be done leading up to it. And once you do it one year, you are forevermore doomed to keep doing it. I didn’t think this through when deciding to make an Advent calendar for my 1-year old. 21 years and 4 kids later, that has been a lot of presents to wrap!!! See here: https://joburgexpat.com/2014/12/a-man-with-a-sack-some-old-boots-and-a-naked-baby-merry-crazy-christmas/.
By the way, is there any way I can sign into your comment system so I don’t have to put in my name and email EVERY TIME!!!?
I love that post! We’re still trying to determine what our traditions are…back in Canada, we went with my wife’s family traditions. And just when we started to think about making our own, we turned our world upside down and moved here.
THe comments thing- that sounds super annoying. Lemme take a look. I have no idea why it’s being annoying like that!