Heavenly Paradise@AdelineAng.com

Halloween is celebrated on October 31st each year. It’s a secular celebration that involves trick-or-treating for young kids, costume parties, pumpkin carving, ghost tours, watching horror movies etc.

My halloween experience from last year can be found here. This is my first year giving out treats to the young children at the door. Most kids came between 6 and 8 p.m., with their halloween outfit.

Halloween treats.

Trick-or-treating:

This cute “monkey” was my favourite!

Pumpkins were hard to find this year, especially the good ones, due to the wet weather. Nonetheless, we managed to find some small pumpkins for carving.

The black cat.

The haunted house.

The owl.

This big pumpkin was carved a week before Halloween, but it lasted only for a few days before the pumpkin was rotten so badly that we had to throw it out.

What does Halloween mean to you? I was never introduced to Halloween celebration until my first year of university in Canada. Halloween is part of the western culture and a good excuse to PARTY!! Not just that, dress-up party is the fun part. And, and, and… Halloween treats! Trick-or-treating is certainly something that kids look forward to. Children will dress up in their Halloween costumes and go door to door in the neighbourhood with siblings or friends asking for Halloween treats.

Halloween decorations.

The Pumpkin Sacrifice is an annual event hosted by the Harrison residence at the University of New Brunswick. I was living in Harrison during my first year of university and have always wanting to attend the event again. What is it all about? It’s a 500 lbs pumpkin plummeting from the roof of the residence!

It’s believed that pumpkin is sacrificed in order to harvest a fruitful academic year. This is the oldest residence tradition in Canada. The tradition started when some Harrison residents decided that it’d be a good idea to throw pumpkin off the roof of the building in 1973.

The ceremony started at 9 p.m. The gigantic pumpkin was carved with the faces of Janus, the two-visaged Roman God of beginnings and endings. It was borne across the quad (in front of the Student Union Building) by ten first-year Harrison students dressed in black, followed by the rest of the first-year residents and ten Harrison alumni in black, with candles held in hands.

Upon reaching the Joy Kidd residence, it was lit with three flares before retracing its steps back to Harrison and hoisted two and a half storey onto the roof of the residence’s lounge.

Candles in the pumpkin almost caught a fire?!

The 36th annual Pumpkin Sacrifice at its climax. Three wise people said an invocation before the crashing of pumpkin.

The pumpkin was set on fire before meeting its doom.

This event brought back my memory of residence life. It was an unforgettable experience to be part of the Pumpkin Sacrifice. This year, however, I was one of the crazy bunch of spectators ;)