Ah, Pumpkin Day arrived this past Saturday and it was a resounding success. At the crack of dawn I awoke to find my husband at his usual seat in front of his laptop playing Scrabble. He looked up as I entered the room and stated, "Happy Pumpkin Day." Hallelujah.. he not only reads my blog entries, he remembers them! It started out as a usual Saturday, going to Petsmart, Cosco and Shop-Rite, but instead of just the usual staples, we added two big pumpkins, a potted mum, and a 1/2 gallon of apple cider to our grocery cart. Now in years past, we would have made an extra stop to a local country market, but to save the extra cost of a trendy market and the gas to drive there, I found everything I needed to celebrate my holiday at Shop-Rite for under $20. My husband decided the dinner menu (as he does every Saturday), and opted for a curried lamb stew made with apples and bananas. As he did his prep, I made pumpkin cookies for our dessert. Once he got his stew in a slow oven, we retreated to the front porch to enjoy Oktoberfest ale and chips and onion dip (have I previously mentioned that there is no dieting on holidays?) We generally do a lot of laughing on the front porch, as now that the kids are grown and gone, we can get very silly indeed. Just watching my pet bunny Otis hop around the porch, acting all big and bad in front of the squirrels is a hoot. While my husband prepared the oven potatoes for our meal, I went online and found our nighttime "readings". We both enjoy poetry, so I printed about 15 poems about pumpkins. The house smelled incredible as the cookies cooled and the stew slow cooked. Needless to say our dinner was exquisite! At sunset, we retreated to the patio, took Otis to his dog-pen, and read the pumpkin poems to each other. They were very, very funny adult poems (especially as alcohol was involved) about man's failure at growing a prizewinning pumpkin. At nightfall, we lit a bon-fire in our fire-bowl, played music from our ipod, and I danced around and threw cinnamon into the fire, as my husband gathered sticks from the yard to keep it going. He also played the Rolling Stones, "Satanic Majesty's Request", which was a favorite album from my rebellious youth, and so caterwauling had to be included in the festivities . We laughed and reminisced until bedtime, but the fun continued well into the night. We had so much fun, that we both decided that there will be a new holiday on the first Saturday of every month. So the next holiday after Halloween will be Cornucopia Day, or as my husband would claim...Feast of the Overflowing Cornucopia... only a month away! Yea!
