Montreal has a reputation for going all out on Halloween. What are your plans this year? Sort through your memories, and describe the best Montreal halloween experience of your life. The worst? Do you have any tips or advice to make it extra fun?Image Source: Flickr, Smoke Tinged Halloween, 2007.
I'm not one to get dressed up and go out to Halloween parties so instead I will describe one of the fall activities that goes on here in the city that has to do with Halloween.
Every year the Montreal Botanical Gardens has the Great Pumpkin Ball. During the month of October, hundreds of decorated pumpkins are on exhibit in the Main Exhibition Greenhouse. While it's been a few years since I've gone to see them, I remember it was lots of fun since you get see just how creative people can get when it comes to decorating them. There's also a contest where you can submit a pumpkin. I think one year my Girl Guide group participated in the contest...we didn't win anything but it was fun.
Halloween was always my favourite holiday as a kid, and it still is. There's just something about the fall atmosphere that makes halloween fit just right with how I'm feeling (there's nothing scarier than midterms in the month of October).
Back in the day there was nothing more exciting than trick-or-treating. The best years were the ones between the ages of 8 and 12, when it was still cool to dress up and go out (the trend came back in our teenage years when we would hit the streets in costume in an attempt to pass as children... but I won't go there).
As kids, we'd often go to my uncles house in Lorraine and trick-or-treat with my older cousins (always fun). We'd walk up the hill to where all the big rich houses were because we knew that's where the best loot could be found. Many of the houses were really decked-out with pumpkins, skeletons and corpses, and there were always a few whose garages or backyards had been pain-stakingly transformed into haunted houses.
Ah, those were the days. I hope in the future I have the opportunity to make halloween as great an experience for my kids as it was for me. Coming back to the present, though, I don't have set plans for this year and I'm really not sure what's out there, so I'd be interested to hear what other people are doing!
As a child I absolutely LOVED Halloween!! I would spend hours decorating my house weeks before the big night! Over the years I feel like I just keep getting lazier and I no longer feel like standing out in the cold for a day to decorate my house for one night. I still love the holiday and love giving out candy to all the kids.
As a child, my father would take my sister and I trick or treating around our block. We always knew there was this one house that would give out HUGE Caramilk bars, they were the only generous house on the block, the rest would stick to the standard tootsie roll, lollipop combo.
I no longer do anything exciting for Halloween although this year I would like to dress up as one of the "guidette's" from the Hit reality TV show Jersey Shore! Although i don't know where i'm going to where this costume....
This year, is going to be a surprise. I don't normally make plans for H-day because, well, even if I did, that's not where I end up. I am worming up at my friends who lives in the aprt bellow mine. Later I will stroll down Montreal's Downtown in which ever direction the costumes lead me.
Past H-days were a little more exiting. I lived in a smaller town, Barrie Ontario where House Parties ruled pretty much my entire life. My best memory is us five girls dressed as the Spice Girls --- but after they all committed suicide. We had the cheap girl get-up but covered in blood. Good mix!!!
Having grown up next door to a German family, one of their sons having become my best friend, it stands to reason that Oktoberfest became a yearly tradition. It grew to include many families and friends, about sixty people in all. Needless to say, scheduling became a problem. About ten years back, all of our family friends decided that the best day to do it (the one day everyone had available in the month, basically)also happened to be Halloween. In one of my rare strokes of genius, I suggested we hold a Halloween themed Oktoberfest. The mixture of jack-o-lanterns, weisswurst, German beers and costumes proved to be the perfect fit and has endured all of these years, so much so that it is the one event that I look forward to all year long. There's just something strange and wonderful in seeing your family friends, many of whom are, to put it gently, getting on in age, just let loose, dress up and have a great time just being silly.
Also, at the risk of revealing my age, one of my favorite Halloween traditions was watching Roseanne. Mostly because the jack-o-lanterns were always so great.
As a kid, I didn't know what halloween was! We didn't celebrate it in my home country, Senegal. But as I got my feet in these lands I learned to appreciate, yet another "fun" holiday and since then | been dressing up...This past halloween I was a nurse and my advice is "have fun, enjoy the moment, don't eat too much candies ( avoid cavaties) and stay safe. It is nice to be a kid at heart from time to time.