Our neighbor is creative. Sarah and family moved here from Brittany and brought with them a professional style crêpière so it wasn’t long before we got invited to their re-creation of a Restaurant Crêperie in their kitchen, complete with umbrellas for decoration to represent their frequently wet weather. The galettes had filling choices of ham, egg, sauteed onions, and cheese. For the dessert crêpes we could select sugar, honey, salted caramel or chocolate sauce, jams, and a hazelnut spread. Cups of cold cider were plentiful throughout the meal. While all of that was fairly traditional, her Halloween party foods were even more imaginative, starting with what Bill and I called “lady fingers” but Sarah labeled even more menacingly as les doigts de sorcières, witches’ fingers that you see at the top of this post. That’s their carved butternut squash, above to the left. A few more photos follow.

In our neighborhood, door-to-door trick or treating hasn’t really caught on (we saw only 3 family groups last year) but the theme of Halloween is increasingly present in shop windows and newspaper advertisements. The city hosts a party and parade and in their Facebook photos in the gallery below you can see from the crowd that it’s become very popular. Also below you’ll see a frozen hand keeping the drinks cold, tarantula eggs, and a plateful of eyeballs. 

Just to end on a smile, here’s a true story: Where we used to live in Georgia there were 2 businesses side-by-side that shared the same family name; one was a funeral parlor. The other was a barbecue restaurant that sometimes advertised their specialty: fried fingers. We never ate there. Happy Halloween!