Hallowe'en/Samhain 2025

The Friday before last (31st October) it was Hallowe'en and Samhain. I celebrated by carving a pumpkin, putting up some decorations and making some food and drink. I baked gingerbread skeletons, made some potato salad based on a recipe from the book The Kitchen Witch by Soraya and my favourite Demon's Blood drink (ginger beer mixed with apple juice and orange juice, and dyed green). The drink recipe is from Kate West's book The Real Witches' Kitchen.

Here's a picture of the pumpkin: 

 And here are a couple of photos of the decorations: 

Sorry it's a bit dark but the word says "Spooky"!

 

 

I set up my usual "Hallowe'en altar". I got some new decorations this year (the bat, ghosts and "Spooky" stickers etc.) 

This year I went back to my usual gingerbread recipe. The past couple of years I used one from OK! magazine but I didn't like them as much. The recipe is an old one from Closer magazine. I don't think it's online but here's a similar one for Christmas gingerbread): https://www.flora.com/en-gb/flora/recipe/gingerbread-biscuits-183529

Both of them are Flora recipes but I use butter. The gingerbread was quite nice. I made a few skeletons and one "screaming face", lol. Here's a pic:

 

I also had some food from the supermarket with the potato salad. I'm glad that my Hallowe'en was better than last year's becaue I wasn't well then.

I'd planned to go to the park for sunset the next day but the weaher wasn't good, so I didn't. I ended up not getting to the park till a week later (this past weekend) because of the weather and various circumstances. But it was a nice day on Saturday and a good sunset. There wasn't much of a view of it in the park itself though.. Here are a couple of photos:

View from by Hove Park.

 

I also went to Burger King. They didn't have any hot drinks which was a shame, so I got a chocolate milkshake instead and also a Coke and a double bacon cheeseburger.

So now we're well into autumn. It's gone quite cold at the moment (more so at night but probably quite average for this time of year. It's about 15C (58F) during the day and 9C (48F) at night. This is the time of year when you really notice the steadily shortening days. 

The nerxt sabbay will be Yule/the Winter Solstice (21st  December this year) which marks the "official start of winter. I'll post about my celebrations.

Hope you had a good Samahin/Halloween! (Or hope you had a good Beltane if you're in the Southern Hemisphere!!) :)