It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

So the teacher at school wants me to come in and talk to the students about Halloween in the States. She wants real examples, like how it is celebrated, and what I did as a child. I will tell her about my brother and I would go door-to-door for hours in our building and come home with bags of candy that lasted till New Year's. Trick-or-treating has not caught on here yet. The children who do celebrate Halloween simply get dressed up, and everyone seems to think you must be either a witch or a ghost.

I will also mention the time when we went trick-or-treating with our friend from the building, and we rang the doorbell of an elderly woman who was known for her bad moods. "I'm not home!" she yelled from behind the door.

The teacher wants me to carve a pumpkin and bring it with me. I've never carved a pumpkin in my life. Everyone here is surprised that I don't know how to do it. I guess Americans are supposed to know these things. I'm hoping for beginner's luck. Apparently, there are definite do's and don't's.

The first task was finding a pumpkin. Well, first finding the word for pumpkin, which is "zucca".

I went to the vegetable market, but no one had them. If they did, they were being sold in slices, or they were these strange-looking beige things. I looked up the words for "whole" and for "round".

Finally I found one stand that had three of them. I picked the roundest-looking one, which is really more of a rectangular shape. The boy and his friend who were over were very excited to see it. The dog went crazy trying to jump high enough to see it on the counter. When the mother came home, she brought it to the floor for him to check out. He thought it was a very large ball for him and started to play soccer with it.