Cogito ergo scribo

On this day every year, i'm always reminded of the time when i was in Canada, living with a bunch of friends in a rented house. We would prepare candies and turned on the lights on the front porch, waiting for the kids in the neighbourhood to do the trick-or-treating. This was the closest form of celebration we had for the Halloween over all those years.

I've never experienced any Halloween party before. You know, the kind that you dress up as someone or something else, party till dawn, get drunk, get high, get laid... Staying off-campus and always being with a close-knit group of Malaysian students means that we pretty much formed our own social circle that hardly interacted with the Canadian students. We would celebrate many occasions together but Halloween wasn't one of them. We were also never invited by any angmo to their Halloween parties. On retrospect, i think i've missed out on the opportunity to live like a true blue Canadian.

In our university, the students on campus celebrated Halloween with a tradition that started more than three decades ago -- the "Great Pumpkin Sacrifice". Every year on the day of Halloween, the students of one of the dorm, Harrison House, would throw a humongous pumpkin (at least 500lb) carved with three eyes and curving mouth off the roof of the dorm. What started as a bo liao gravity experiment by a couple of drunk Harrisonians became one of the most recognizable campus traditions, whereby the pumpkin that is worthy for the ritual is selected from around the world and a grand ceremonious procession precedes the great decent.

I've had the honour of witnessing the drop once. When the great pumpkin came flying down from the roof and smashed onto the ground, everyone cheered and clapped with excitement and youthful anticipation of our great future ahead. That was another time other than giving out the candies to the kids that i could feel the involvement in this occasion.

Now that i'm back in Malaysia, 31-Oct is just a day like any other. No trick-or-treating, no partying, no pumpkin crashing down to the ground. The only way for me to get a taste of the occasion may be to watch the cartoon It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown with all my favourite comic characters coming to live on the screen. But the problem is that i discovered this wasn't among my collections, which i thought it was. I guess it must be the Great Pumpkin playing tricks on my mind.

Anyway, happy Halloween everyone!

(For those who love heavy metal music, 贝 recommends the band Helloween, yes, spelled with an "e".)