Pumpkins at the Farm

I remember back in the day when it was Young's Farm in Dewey on the way to Prescott. We would stop at their store for pumpkin bread and candy sticks and take a few minutes to feed the goats. Though Mortimer Farms has been there for several years now, I haven't spent as much time there. What a better way to do so than their Pumpkin Fest?

I'll repeat some of my reflections on the Desert Botanical Garden's Halloween event. Sometimes events are more for children--which is great, but less great when you don't have children. Mortimer's lets you walk the line between child and adult, if you so please. I didn't really watch shows, but there are shows. And there are rides, rides that the children were enjoying but rides that didn't say they were for children only, or even any sort of height of weight. 

So what do the non-children do? Attack the spinning ride. A central pole with a sort of X at the bottom, with places to sit at the end of each arm of the X. Ropes go from just in front of each side to the top of the pole. So four people sit as someone winds the X around the pole, then lets go. As the ropes unravel from around the pole, the X spins faster and faster, then starts over in the opposite direction from the force of the unraveling. You can go slowly and just wrap it around a little. Or you can have two adults using all their might to quickly bring the X as high as it can go. And it spins much faster than you might expect. It feels like you should have a seatbelt or like your neck might break from the pull. Lovely. Even faster than the teacups at Disneyland. 

Or the little zipline. The non-children took over two of the four lines for a few minutes. Nobody hit the ground or broke the break. Impressive. Then of course there is the corn maze. I had never been in a corn maze before. I don't know that we actually made it to the actual end, maybe just an opening, before turning around and going back out the same way. But it was a nice windy way of exploration, a pleasant walk on a sunny fall day. 

There are chickens and goats and cows and ducks. (Pony rides, too, though of course those really are only for the children.) Silhouettes. Face painting. Food from the farm. Even at the end of October, still plenty of pumpkins left in the patch for picking. Much more fun than picking one up at the store. And these come in more colors and shapes, too. Not just orange but also green and white. 

So whether you are going with children or simply children at heart, there is diversion at the farm. Also lots of sun and open space, and that alone makes it worth the visit. I still miss my memories of Young's Farm, but now I'm feeling warmer towards Mortimer's having actually spent some time there. 

Tony's Chocolonely: Halloween Tiny Tony's Milk Chocolate Caramel Sea Salt

Because I have collected more fall products than I'd anticipated, I'll be ringing in October with a trio of Halloween chocolate candy bags covered in the next three days instead of three weeks. I'm not overly fond of Halloween, but I do like dressing up and I like candy and I'm always after seasonal chocolate products to review. So the increasing availability of seasonal products around this time of year can get even me excited. 

Tony's Chocolonely has certainly been showing up for the candy holidays. They make the Chocolate Eggs for Easter (this has turned out to be one of my most-viewed reviews--perhaps because there is indeed demand for such a product?) and now they have an option for Halloween, too. The thing is, I don't necessarily think it's sustainable to have all Halloween candy be fair trade chocolate. For me, part of the idea of fair trade cocoa is consuming less cocoa (I am aware that this can sound hypocritical coming from a chocolate blogger). So if I were handing out candy, no, I wouldn't be handing these out--and not just because the bag of 27 pieces is about $9. But if you knew you were only going to be handing out a small amount of candy or if you were just having them at home for your own circle of friends and family, then this works.

Philosophy aside, let's get back to the product. Of the three brands of Halloween chocolate I've had so far (I don't think there'll be anymore, but you never know what else you find), this was the only one that had an accurate count. The bag says that there are 27 pieces inside and there are 27 pieces inside. That comes out to 33 cents each, which is also the best value of the three options. I'm not going to start counting grams, but they're decent-sized chocolates, too.

The bag is pretty cute. A standard Halloween orange comes with a pattern of little skeletons and brooms and ghosts and jack-o-lanterns. Again, being that I'm not big on Halloween, I prefer this cute, goofy look to anything truly spooky. It's neutral, too. It can be the candy you buy for your kids or it can be for adults--the packaging doesn't lean too much in one direction or the other.

It's a paper bag, too, which is kind of cool. The individual wrappers are "recyclable plastic;" while maybe we should give them some credit for trying, the fact is that probably not a single one of these will in fact get recycled--even if someone wanted to, finding the right place to send them would be an issue. 

All three of these companies kept their standard packaging for the small wrappers. But I do like the Tony's look best of the three. They already make these Tiny Tony's as part of their product line, and the Milk Chocolate Caramel Sea Salt is already orange (the milk chocolates are red and the dark chocolates are blue, neither of which would look very Halloween--perhaps they'll bring out the milks for Christmas, though?). The bright orange wrappers have a fitting Halloween look. These are the only individual wrappers of the three brands to not include the ingredients list on them, but there is a link to their website to view that info. 

I've never had any of the Tiny Tony's before. They're pretty cute. It's just one little link on a circular piece of chocolate. The chains (which are part of their message/goal about ending slavery, particularly child slavery, in the cocoa industry) look like they're a Halloween design. Again, they just used a product they already make, but the look is great for the season. And it's a great way to link the season with their message. "Hey, did you know that these grotesque chains don't belong to a Halloween monster, they represent the huge issue of child slavery?" (Now I'm picturing someone on the street passing them out as part of a campaign . . . . )

As I mentioned, these candies are the Milk Chocolate Caramel Sea Salt. I've covered it before, both the whole bar and in the Easter eggs. Probably it is most favorable in this form, though that may just be my own bias (the large Tony's bars are so big that they put me off). The chocolate is sweet, nice enough in small doses like this. Lots of caramel and vanilla flavor to it. The caramel itself comes in those little small crunchy bits, along with some big chunks of sea salt. I definitely feel like there is more prevalent salt in here than there was in the bar, though that could just be my memory being fallible. These are big hits of sea salt.

You know, the price tag may be higher on these, but you're paying for more than just fair trade. Not only are these candies possibly slightly bigger than some of the fun size chocolate candies (just a guess), but they also have more chocolate. This is solid milk chocolate except for the sprinkles of salt and crunchy caramel. While Tony's milk chocolate doesn't top my list for milk chocolates, it is certainly better than what probably all of the standard chocolate candy brands make. So the value here is pretty decent.

I started with Tony's because it was the first of the three bags I came across. I don't want to peak too soon, but I definitely score it the highest of the three based on value, quality, and visual appeal. 

The Fall Holidays

I am reminded that fall is my favorite season. It would seem that it should be spring, but as beautiful as spring is, there is something agitating about spring. Fall, on the other hand, is comforting and cozy.

As far as the fall holidays go, I'm not so big on Halloween as everyone these days seems to be. I like dressing up and I like candy and bats are pretty, but the rest of it? I'm just not interested. So right now that everyone is all in the Halloween mood, I'm excited that Thanksgiving is coming up.

Perhaps Thanksgiving gets hyped less because its theme is not commercial--and unlike Christmas, it still retains that good core. (Okay, Christmas does, too, to many people, but it has that highly commercialized exterior.) Yet I do like to put out all my turkeys in November, and I do like to buy a little Thanksgiving something at the stores just to show that hey, there are those of us who like Thanksgiving, too, not just Halloween or Christmas.

You have to be quick about it, though. Stores put out such little Thanksgiving merchandise (apart from the foodstuffs that come later, of course) that you have to nab it right when you see it or it'll be gone.

I do like the vintage-inspired signage that you can sometimes find, so I picked up these two at Hobby Lobby earlier in the year. They somewhat go with my Victorian-esque style.

At Wal-Mart, I got place cards not because I necessarily needed any but just to get something. And also because the name (Julia) they used for an example is the name of the character in my novel--and as you'll know if you've read my book, Thanksgiving was her favorite holiday.

At Michael's, I found these two necklace kits. I guess they're designed as a craft for kids to do on the day of, but I just wanted the wooden turkeys for me. I'll make a necklace or bracelet or two without the plastic beads.

I also got a wooden tree there. It's two flat pieces of wood that fit in together to make a 3-D shape. Perhaps I might try staining it at some point; I'm not sure. It has little leaves with space on them to write what you're thankful for. You then attach them to the tree. I thought that might make for a nice little sentimental thing to do. I don't always like the forced, flat sentiment, but this year I am reminded that I am in fact quite genuinely sentimental, so perhaps this will work. And you can always make new leaves year after year, always keeping the tree around. (I also just have a thing for trees, so maybe that's why I got this one--or it could be that it seemed like a genuine Thanksgiving thing, not a commercialized thing.)

I don't usually put anything outside, but I guess I wanted to get into the spirit of the fall holidays that some of my neighbors are starting in on without all the Halloween things they have. So I put a pumpkin in the middle of my usual door wreath. Pumpkins can be either Halloween or Thanksgiving, though the sentiment definitely puts it in the spirit of Thanksgiving. And why not? If other people love Halloween so much that they start putting out Halloween things in September, I'll just go ahead and love Thanksgiving so much that I start putting Thanksgiving things out in October.

I don't want to call on fear; I want to call on thanksgiving.

It's Fall

The later part of September was a tad warmer than usual this year. Normally by that point the edge of the heat has come off, but this time we had an earlier cooler spell (as in, less hot spell) followed by one last hot spell before the switch to October brought the sudden onset of Fall.

The nights cool off enough now that it takes a little bit of time for the day to heat enough to actually be hot instead of just comfortable and pleasant. In fact, the nights are suddenly cool enough that I just switched to my winter sheets.

The air tastes different. The baked scent of summer is gone, turned crisp instead. The colors around the Phoenix area don't change much until January, but if you drive even just a little north, you'll find the greens beginning to fade and the leaves beginning to disappear.

The light has changed. It's now dark in the morning when I get up. And the sun is already flirting with the horizon by the time I'm heading home--the nice part about that is that I get to see all the brilliant pink colors while I drive.

These changes have been happening over the last few days, but it was this morning that I felt wrapped up by Fall. I felt cozy and comfortable and happy. I made a second cup of tea. In the morning, I put on my cashmere house sweater (that means that it's mended and not for wearing out but still ridiculously comfy for home use), and by late morning, I had all the windows open to finally let the place air out after the long summer.

I felt wrapped up by all that Fall beckoned. A touch of Halloween perhaps, but mainly the promise of Thanksgiving and Christmas. Turkeys and tablecloths and cookies and pies and family. The holiday season is a good time, a time when we're constantly thinking of ways to bring cheer to the short and dark and (sometimes) cold days.

Thanks be for the beauty of the changing seasons.

Titles for the Fall

With fall, I would think that there would be plenty of stories to mention the fall harvest and that sort of angle. Plenty of them do mention the harvest briefly, but it usually doesn't seem to form the center of a story for the simple reason that the fall harvest is a good time and stories need conflict in order to have any sort of plot. So it's more common for stories to have an overall sense of the decay and overall windiness of fall than of the bounty of the harvest. At random, I've chosen three titles to touch on today.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe. I mentioned decay, so naturally I was thinking of this story. It's all about decay: the decay of the house and the decay of the people in it and the decay of the family in general. For a dark look at fall, this is the story. Since it's Poe, it naturally also ties in well with Halloween. More, though, than the "spooky" elements of the story, it's the elements of nature that he describes that make this story fit in so well with the atmosphere of a season of the weather.

Silas Marner by George Eliot. I don't remember if this short book focuses in particular on any one season. But the overall feel of it has always made me think of fall. Silas Marner is, in many ways, at the autumn of his life. He is no longer young and he has nothing to make him look forward to the next day--and when he loses his gold, he loses all his happiness. Yet he finds a new kind of gold in the form of a gold-haired child who falls into his lap and becomes a daughter to him. The color gold, simply, is reminiscent of autumn because it's the color that many green leaves turn. And the sense of the old that will soon be replaced by the young is very much like the changing seasons: the blooms and green grasses and leaves fall and fade away in autumn to make way for fresh ones to come in spring.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Probably this book has more of winter in it than spring, but it feels more like fall. There is so much talk about the wind and the isolation and the moors and the wind, all of these harsher elements of weather. And then there is Heathcliff. He is Nature, this inexplicable and unstoppable force, this harsh element of weather that rushes in and takes over for a season before fading away again. He's too alive to be winter; instead, I think of him as fall (winter is his death). Here is a combination of the previous two titles in the sense of darkness and seasons that will change.

From a daily perspective, no, I don't think of fall itself as dark. It's an exciting time, when the weather cools off enough to start going outside again more often (or at more times of the day). While the wildflowers of spring are beautiful, so can be the dry grasses of autumn. And with the holidays coming up, you start getting a nesting feeling that takes you into the short days of December. So, no, I don't think of fall as dark; it's just that there are some wonderful dark elements to books that focus on the changing of seasons.