It was one of the great Fridays. I did my pumpkin carving all by myself. It was my first attempt to do some creative through crude artwork after my entrance examination for IIT, Kharagpur in 1957in which I had attempted to draw a crow like bird freehand perhaps ten times of the given size. Both attempts came out well.

But still I couldn’t appreciate my work on pumpkin till I saw a candle lighted inside making it interesting though without creating any horror. It became a real happy evening when I saw the hordes of kids of all ages in wonderful Halloween specific dresses coming for collecting their share of candies. It was Shannon who clarified the ‘Halloween Trick and Treat‘ and helped me to appreciate its significance better. But then I found 3,950,000 entries in Google.

For Halloween, I saw the number of entries at 189,000,000. Halloween seems to carry varying religious and social significances. Yamuna was happy that even in US people talk of witches. Perhaps every society has conceived of the witches to create fear in its earliest ages. I get reminded of my childhood when my grandmother will tell me to be at distance from some lady as she was a witch (dayan). My grandmother used to tell many stories of the witches. Even today witch-hunt goes on in villages and less affluent society, many times resulting in horrible end. Interestingly, Anvita, the eldest of the granddaughters of the family came to meet us dressed up as a vampire. Yamuna could appreciate it more when I explained that vampire is a blood-sucking witch.

Shannon as great host kept on offering the candies. With the number of children visiting us, it appeared that the community around appeared to be very participative. Richrd Florida in his new book, ‘Who’s Your City?‘ has mentioned about the number of Halloween visitors as index of livability of the community. Yamuna and myself enjoyed the dresses and makeup along with their brimming enthusiasm.

Around 60 kids would have visited us. All these kids must be collecting quite a lot of the candies, may be good enough for few weeks. When I asked my grandson Keshav and Anvita, I found their score as 135 and 100 respectively. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the market of Halloween related consumer goods and commodities must be in billion in US, and China gets the maximum out of this consumerism.