If you know about the good and bad spirits of the Balinese culture and religion and the demonic statues they create leading up to Nyepi, it is surprising that the Balinese don’t embrace Halloween.
We arrived back from a couple of weeks in North America, after seeing pumpkins and Halloween paraphernalia everywhere, to find no spooky trace of anything Halloween in Bali.
After recovering a little from the jetlag, we decided to follow the momentum we had gained in the US by having our own little family Halloween event, including some decorations, dressing up, and carving.
We have very limited dress-ups to work with, so I will have to explain what we dressed as. Clare was a green witch (not the right face for it though!), Rob was the grim reaper, Jetson a minion, Casper the friendly ghost (of course) and Olive after a few costume changes dressed as a Balinese princess.
Carvable pumpkins are hard to find here, so we resorted to what we referred to as Balinese pumpkins. They were an adequate replacement and were actually slightly easier to carve.
The added bonus of eating the insides of our Balinese version was much tastier than the actual pumpkins. It was also less messy to get out, which Olive refused to do for the real pumpkin. Eeew!
Although our Balinese version of Halloween was pretty lame, we did get to experience the build-up to Halloween while in America, which was amazing, if not overwhelming. They certainly don’t do things by halves! The house we stayed at had blow-up items all over the yard, headless horsemen, black cats, and gargoyles! As well as lit-up pumpkins, skulls, and eyeballs in the garden. We thought it might be scary for the kids but they were OK with it.
We were taken to a pumpkin farm, where we got to choose our own special pumpkins that we wanted to carve. There is a real art in choosing the right one – apparently! There were some giant pumpkins too, which were on display as part of the yearly pumpkin growing festival.
Jetson was feeling hungry (or is he just being silly again?)
We took home our chosen pumpkins and had our first attempt at carving, which turned out pretty well we think.
Proud Olive and her pussy cat pumpkin.
