The Ottley Flat: YSA Halloween Party

For Family Home Evening on Nov 5th we were going to have a bonfire and cook scout dinners, in honor of Guy Fawkes Day which is every 5th of Nov. Guy Fawkes tried to blowup Parliament a long time ago so England celebrates that he was not successful and that he was burned at the stake by having bonfires and fireworks every year. Well it didn't work out that we could have the bonfire where we had planned so Elder Ottley and I decided that we would celebrate Halloween just a few days late.

We planned to have a pumpkin carving contest, a costume in a sack contest and eating donuts from a string contest. England does not celebrate Halloween as we do in USA and they don't like pumpkin so it turned out that no stores had any pumpkins. We settled for Honey Dew. No problem, we move on to finding things to put in the costume sack. Our town has two or three charity shops on each of its two streets. We go to all the shops and can't find anything that is really ugly enough to put in the sack. The shops are small and they don't really have anything that is bad. Then I found one dress that I thought would work and bought it. We then went to the 99 pence store because that was the only place I had noticed any Halloween decorations. Surely they would have things they wanted to close out. Nope all their shelves were changed to Christmas and nothing left from Halloween. I bought two little princes tutu's, and a set of little girls necklace & earrings and a couple Christmas decorations I thought would help. We ended up going home and putting our clothes in the bags.

By the time they got there (YSA standard time 7:30) we started off with Claudia giving us a short lesson that was very good and then we went into our activities. It was very interesting that we had only one person that had ever carved a pumpkin and only one that had done a costume in a bag. They all seem to have fun doing these and then when we moved onto the donuts on a string they were all having a great time. They all finished and then they wanted Elder Ottley and I to do it. So we did. The first thing I did wrong was choose a cake donut and the first thing Elder Ottley did right was choose a jelly filled donut that didn't have a hole in the middle so his fit snug on the string. After I took one bite and mine fell, I realized that his didn't have the hole so I went over and acted like I was going to take a bite out of his and he pushed it into my face with his face. I ended up with a mouth full and jelly all over my face. The YSA got a hoot out of it.

By the time we finished cleaning up the church and got home on the bus it was all over facebook and one said it was the best FHE he had ever had.