Gourds in my baked goods + Halloween spirit

In the last week, I have made zucchini cookies and pumpkin swirl bread. Both were quite good, but I'm not sure that gourds make for the best textured desserts. I am pretty sure Joseph is beginning to wish I would stop making treats out of veggies. (Plot twist: zucchini's actually a fruit.) And I think I'm gonna be with him on that for a bit now. I get an itch to try new stuff every now and then, buuuuuut that pumpkin swirl bread was enough adventure to last me a while. (It called for a real pumpkin, so it was DIY pumpkin puree...)

Can we just chat for a minute about what this pumpkin bread symbolizes, though? I have pretty much always hated Halloween, but for some reason yesterday, I experienced just a lil twinge of Halloween spirit. It kind of took me off guard (or maybe OFF GOURD HAHAHA), and I didn't know what to do. 

So I have here listed all of the things about this Halloween that I liked! Of course.


:: I decorated our apartment a little. My mom gifted us a cute little pumpkin earlier in the month, so I stuck it on a cinder block outside our front door as an outdoor decoration. And then last week she scored a decent sized ceramic jack-o-lantern at an estate sale and offered it to me. And instantly in my head I was like, "I want to put a plant in that but will it look dumb?" I tried it and looooved it. It looks like he has an afro!

Mr. Pumpkin is still smiling down upon me as I write this. I think I might do some November harvest-y decorating by just turning him around so it looks like a plain pumpkin. Is that cheating or frugality? 

:: That outdoor decorating pumpkin was small and held up well, so I used it to make tonight's pumpkin swirl bread. When we hung out with the Moores a few weeks ago, we talked about the gourds Miranda had decorated with in the dining room and about how James thought they should get gourds they could actually eat later. So, like, they were planning on eating their decorations! And I thought that was awesome. So I copied it. Thanks for the idea, Moores!

:: The night before Halloween, Joseph killed a huge black widow on our porch. This was totally freaky and not actually an enjoyable experience, but it definitely made Halloween feel authentic.

:: The weather was awesome this year. Usually, Utah decides to drop the first snow in the few days before Halloween, which makes for miserable trick-or-treating. I could probably blame the weather of past years for a portion of my Halloween disdain, so the lack of bad weather this year made me ever-so-happy.

:: Thriller came on the radio as I was leaving work yesterday. So, like, Halloween to the max. 

:: Math ed majors can choose to get class credit by trick or treating to their professors' offices. I took advantage of this (I always do), and this year somebody was giving out Halloween shaped pretzels! And man, I love pretzels.

:: We played with our friends Jeff and Alyssa until the wee hours of the morning, and by "played" I mean that we really just made root beer and talked and talked and talked. And this is the best kind of playing, as far as I'm concerned. 


So, like, Halloween spirit, right?! Except it took all of these things together for me to experience my little tiny twinge of Halloween spirit. But at least I can finally say that I understand (a little) why people go nuts over this holiday. It may never be my favorite, but I guess I don't have to hate it. 

Remind me that I said that when next Halloween hits, mmkay pumpkin? Thanks.