Pumpkins

A few days after Halloween my parents invited the kids over for pumpkin picking in their garden. We came home with plenty for baking plus enough to share with a neighbor. In addition to a traditional pie I made pumpkin bread. While The Man and I are not usually pumpkin-flavored food fans we all liked this recipe. It’s moist and fragrant, not too sweet, with more of a gingerbread flavor than a pumpkin taste. I roasted and pureed a pumpkin the kids picked instead of using canned pumpkin, reduced the sugar to 1.5 cups, and baked it in wider shallower loaf pans for about 50-55 minutes. It’s a great way to use up pie pumpkins before Advent. Enjoy a golden slice with butter and a steaming cup of tea.

Halloween

We had a surprisingly lovely Halloween. “Lovely” isn’t the first adjective I’d usually associate with that holiday, but there it is.

The kids helped scoop out the pumpkins for jack-o-lanterns before I carved them the night before Halloween. Annie was especially into it and stayed to scoop long after the others ran off to help Daddy in the yard.

Our friends down the street invited us over for pizza and salad and then we bundled the kids up and piled out into the crisp fall air for trick-or-treating. They have three boys in the same age range as our children and we love having them as neighbors. Our kids routinely play together, we’ve had them up for s’mores, most of the children went to nature camp together this summer, and I attend a community Bible study with the mother. Our kids had a great time rushing together from house to house this year.

We live in a fairly quiet neighborhood with few children and many reserved neighbors who stick to themselves and don’t even go into their yards. After some initial loneliness here we’ve been working hard at building relationships in our community and we noticed it paying off this Halloween. It felt like such a cheerful, neighborly, social evening with friendly greetings and brief catch ups all through the neighborhood.

Our kids reveled in the unheard of privilege of ten pieces of candy before bed, enjoyed a couple more pieces each day through the weekend, and that was that.

I have mixed feelings about Halloween. My parents, concerned by the gleeful representations of evil in our town and the holiday’s historical background, decided our family would no longer celebrate Halloween when I was about eight. I respect their thoughtful decision, but also love the simple fun and pageantry of it for little kids: costumes, crunching through fallen leaves in the cold and dark with friends, friendly neighbors, treats.  Nobody in our neighborhood puts up scary decorations. There’s little preparation required (bag of candy, pumpkin or two, costumes, no house cleaning or cooking!, done) and it only lasts a day. I think one of the reasons I love Halloween is that there’s no other holiday like it for community, at least here in the United States. On Thanksgiving most people celebrate with family or close friends or perhaps invite lonely strangers. Christmas is almost always with family, New Years with family or friends, Easter with family and church, Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor day with friends or family. Halloween, though, is with your neighborhood. It’s the day when everyone with kids steps out and greets everyone else in the neighborhood, and almost every neighbor opens their door with a big smile to see the costumes and say hello to the adults. We had neighbors we barely know checking before the holiday to make sure we were planning on stopping by their house and met new neighbors who’d just moved in.

Three weeks later all the leaves are down, snow covers the ground, and I’m planning dishes for Thanksgiving. In my childhood the earliest snow I can remember was on Halloween, but in the past few years we’ve already had several rounds of sticking snow by the time Thanksgiving rolls around. It’s dark by late afternoon, and we have candles with dinner and a fire in the fireplace almost every night. Cozy season is here!

Easter Sunday 2017

Easter Sunday fell in the middle of an ICU night call stretch for the Man. He spent all night working in the ICU, needed recovery sleep for most of the day, and had to go back in to work on Easter night. We all had the stomach flu last Easter so it was a bit of a bummer to miss church on the biggest feast day of the year again. Still, we can’t complain since he had both Christmas and Thanksgiving off this year. That’s only happened a handful of times in his whole medical career!

The kids and I had a lovely start to Easter itself. The kids woke up to chocolate rabbits and a new book each (The Easter Story from Scholastic, The Twenty-Third Psalm and The Lord’s Prayer illustrated by Tim Ladwig, and When God Made You by Matthew Paul Turner). We don’t do filled Easter baskets – not for any deep philosophical reasons, just because I didn’t grow up with them and them seem like another parental obligation resulting in junk and sugar all over the house ;). These cinnamon rolls from Smitten Kitchen turned out perfectly for breakfast and we all loved them. I only noticed her note about switching to a different recipe after making the original, but I have no complaints about using the old one. It was great! I sang Easter hymns at the table with the kids and read the Easter story. The Man arrived home from the hospital after breakfast, stayed awake long enough to gulp a cinnamon roll, and stumbled upstairs to sleep. The morning went a bit downhill from there – overexcited kids on sugar highs, food to prep, girls’ hair to do, and four wiggly people to wrestle into their Easter finest. It’s possible some maternal yelling occurred. Maybe. Likely. Definitely.

My brother and sister-in-law invited us for our nephew’s baptism, followed by Easter brunch at their house. Knowing one of our kids really could not handle that much extra stimulation in one day we limited ourselves to brunch. We were bummed to miss the baptism, but the great surprise bonus was that the Man woke up just in time for lunch and was able to join us at the last minute. We had a delicious and fun meal with our relatives, my sister-in-law’s family, and some of their friends. I can remember Easters with snow on the ground during my childhood so an outdoor lunch with sunny warm weather was a nice treat! My Dad took a few family photos for us. We’ve never yet caught a family photo with all six of us smiling and looking at the camera. This day was no different, but at least we’re all in the picture.

I thought my brother did a brilliant job coming up with a make-ahead brunch menu. He picked items that required minimal attention during the quick turnaround between church and 20 people coming right over after the service. He had quiches and ham waiting in a warm oven, cold asparagus in a lemon vinaigrette, scones, sliced tomatoes with mozzarella, a fruit salad from my Mom, and deviled eggs from me (I used the Joy of Cooking recipe for the first time and brought the filling in a ziploc so I could just snip the corner and pipe it in on arrival – it was much better than my usual slapdash version). They served pre-made cakes from the grocery store and had juice, mimosa fixings, and water steeped with berries all prepared in advance. Definitely a menu to copy if you want a fabulous brunch that lets you sit and talk with your guests rather than fluttering round the kitchen.

On the longish car ride home we bribed the children with the promise of a bear cracker at home if they managed to stay awake. Over-sugared and oversocialized small children + no nap for kids + no sleep for Daddy before another night of ICU makes a scary math problem. Luckily three out of four made it and went down peacefully for naps (the fourth played quietly in her room, so success all round). The Man also went back to bed and slept for most of the afternoon in preparation for another night at work. After their nap the kids and I took a long neighborhood walk to keep the house quiet for him until dinner time. We got back just after he’d woken up and headed down to the basement to exercise: “It’s Daddy!”

This was our second year observing the liturgical octave (eight days) of Easter, building on our long-standing tradition of celebrating the twelve days of Christmas and, of course, Lent and Holy Week. This post from Better than Eden summarizes my growing appreciation for the drawn out holiday octave. It is so much more relaxing and meditative as the parent of many young children when you can enjoy Easter at a leisurely pace instead of cramming everything into one day and never getting any rest yourself! We went to bed knowing that Easter had only just begun. Seven more days lay ahead for Easter hymns, Easter stories, special foods, family fun, and secular traditions like an egg hunt.