Halloween

For my first Halloween in the Middle East, I wanted to go for a bit of a local flare so I decided to dress as Cleopatra and to try to evoke a little "curse of the mummy" spookiness. I knew, from arriving last year in early December, that Christmas gets a lot of play, the shops are full of twinkling trees and Santas, there are events featuring fake snow and real penguins, and so on. But how was a made-in-America holiday featuring witches, ghosts and devils gonna fly in a fairly religious country?  There were no bags of candy corns showing up on shelves in August, even 3 weeks out, in early October, when I went in search of a plastic skull for my meathead, I was told to come back in a week or two for Halloween items. I knew I'd have to improvise.

First, I made a cat mummy. I was going to just shape him out of plastic grocery bags, pillow filler and packing tape, but then I kinda liked the look of the packing tape and, it turns out that they don't really sell gauze strips here. Gauze pads, clever gauze tubes to slip over all kinds of wounds, ace bandages, but no rolls of gauze to wrap a mummy cat. so his final outer layer is packing tape.

I had a sheet I was prepared to tear into strips to make my larger human mummy project but it was going to take way more grocery bags than i had on hand to shape this guy. Water bottles, milk bottles, a plastic bucket that had been filled with candy, a shoe box, a packing box, a thin synthetic IKEA comforter that didn't fit my beds... my mummy is a regular recyclers dream and is about the size of a 10 year old.

I did find some Halloween decorations in stores- a surprisingly good selection at the Choithrams which is an Indian owned chain? We made canoptic jars (for the storage of organs in the mummification process) from Pringles cans and salt dough, I covered boxes with craft paper and hieroglyphics for bricks, used crumpled pieces of brown paper bags (covered with more hieroglyphics) to finger paint out messages in blood red paint from the cursed, taped spiders and webs to the wall and called it decorated.

A few grocery stores sold traditional bright orange jack-o-lantern style pumpkins imported from the US but they were going for about $5 per pound, and pumpkins are pretty heavy fruit. I decided to take advantage of some other more local produce options and to try out carving a papaya and pineapple. Also, we picked up a few local pumpkins, kind of a yellow/ green color and typically a bit smaller than US jack-o-lanterns, but pretty good carvers. The papaya was a nice surprise- the orange flesh inside glowed really vibrantly. And the pineapple stem made for cute "hair". And we could eat the "guts" as we scooped them!

I did my usual food spread with the meathead (in the end my sister sent a plastic skull which arrived just in the nick of time!) and a watermelon brain and the stuffed date roaches (scarab beetles this year). I also added a pyrex dish full of "intestines" (brie and chutney in puff pastry tubes, coiled in the dish in a creepy way) and a friend made witch finger cookies.

Bringing my favorite holiday to Dubai went pretty well! Just wait until next year.