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Nov 1, 2011 - Events    2 Comments

Halloween

As most people who know me will remember – I do NOT like Halloween.  It has to be my least favorite day of the year – that is until this Halloween.

Halloween here is a fun time.  Children (and adults) get dressed up and go out trick or treating from about 5 o’ clock onwards.  People decorate their houses with lights and pumpkins.  If you have a pumpkin on your step or any kind of Halloween decoration up you are fair game for trick or treat.

We took a drive around to see what decorations people had put up.  It really did vary from the very modest to the extreme.  We stopped outside one house in the village and could not believe what they had done.  Their whole house had been turned into a hospital – a haunted hospital of course.  We had to go inside and have a look.  It was great – they had turned each room into a different dept from a hospital.  We went to X-ray, surgery, the pharmacy, the doctor and the waiting room.  We spoke to the ladies that had organised it, and put in all the hard work, and they told us that it had been in the making for a whole month – now that’s dedication.  We took some photos but somebody also took a video and uploaded it to You Tube – you can find it here….

We had been told to expect a few visitors and so we stocked up on jelly body parts and crisps and waited…..  As we were waiting we decided that the house didn’t look like it was ‘open for Halloween’ so we got a couple of lanterns and put them on the steps, we turned the trees lights on, put up a little gravestone, shredded some black bin liners and attached them to the roof of the porch and then changed the normal bulb for a red one – it was all true Blue Peter fashion (we were just missing the washing up liquid bottle).  And then they started arriving……and they kept coming….and coming…. and coming…….by the end of the night we had had 89 trick or treaters.

Each and every person, vampire, ghost, skeleton, fairy, pirate, monkey, bunny and witch that came to the door had made a real effort to make their costume fab and above all they were really polite.  We had one little visitor, Dracula, who showed me his teeth when he got to the door – I told him he was very scary and so he very quickly removed the teeth as he didn’t want to scare me anymore – how sweet is that.

The emergency services also put on a haunted house.  They took over the old grain elevator and turned it into some kind of scary event.  It proved to be very popular – we watched as car after car arrived at the car park to go to the grain elevator (we can see it from the deck on the back of the house we are staying in) and then heard the screams of the people who were inside.

 

 

 

Oct 1, 2011 - Events    No Comments

Dave Gunning

Last night we were lucky enough to go to a private concert by Dave Gunning.  A couple (Dave & Christine) that we met a few weeks ago whilst at Fables (the local wine bar in the village – yes we have a wine bar) invited us to their place to see this concert.  They had won the privilege by entering a raffle run by Friends of Redtail.  

For those of you who have never heard of Dave Gunning, (I hadn’t until about 4 weeks ago), he is a local folk singer.  He grew up in Pictou (about 50 minutes from us) and has since travelled all over the world singing.

So – there were about 30 of us at the concert which was held in Dave & Christine’s barn.  They had done a fantastic job of decorating the barn with candles and christmas lights.  We all sat on hay bales to listen to the concert and had beer with chips and dips.  It was a very sociable evening and everyone had a fab time.

Dave Gunning was not only a really good performer he was a great entertainer as well.  He had a lot of stories about where his songs had come from – most of them funny.  He said about one song, ‘this song is about hanging, and no matter which way you look at it to try and get a deeper meaning out of it … it’s a hanging song’  The song itself was well written but, it was indeed about hanging.

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