In the fall of 2000, ten-year-old Mimi Melton began "Year 5" at a primary school in Essex, a county in southeastern England. The following are excerpts from her journal.

Mimi's Journal (October 29 - November 1, 2000)

October 29
Today I went to a Halloween party. Jordon and Joe are boys in my class, and they gave the party. They are really funny. I was dressed as a devil this year. I had black pants, a red shirt, red lipstick, and a horn headband. It had some red and green shiny stuff on it, so the boys called me "Christmas decorations!" Here you don't dress up as much. You dress up as witches or ghosts or zombies or vampires. But you wouldn't dress up here as the Little Mermaid or Simba or a baked potato (which is what my sister wanted to dress up as!). In the United States, my friend Jenny even dressed up as a beard! You wouldn't do that here.

We played some fun games at the party. First, they tied candy to a piece of cardboard, and you tried to see who could eat it the fastest. Another game was to take a lemon and swat it with a flyswatter across the room. We ate chicken nuggets and fries and then told scary stories. We got cute goody bags full of candy and went home.

October 30
Today we made jack-o'-lanterns with Mom's friend Liz from college (who's English), and her friend Peter (who's German). They had never made jack-o'-lanterns before! Our jack-o'-lanterns were a bat and a cat (that rhymes!) They turned out really well. Mom roasted the pumpkin seeds, and they tasted really good.

November 1
Last night, on Halloween, we had a party at our house. Not very many kids here go trick-or-treating (only two groups came to our door) and we wanted to do something special so we wouldn't miss Halloween at home. We decorated the house in orange and black and put out the jack-o'-lanterns. We hung spider webs with plastic spiders in them. We had big jack-o'-lantern punching balls, too. We put popcorn and chips out, and Halloween plates and cups and napkins.

I invited five girls, and Beth invited two. We played a lot of games when our guests arrived. First we played "Pin the Smile on the jack-o'-lantern." On a piece of butcher paper, Liz and I had drawn and colored a big jack-o'-lantern without a mouth. We had cut out a smile for each guest. We blindfolded them, and they had to try to pin the smile on the jack-o'-lantern. Katie won.

We played Wink Murder, where a "murderer" winks at you and you have to "die." When you pretend to die you get to ham it up as much as you want! A "detective" tries to figure out who the murderer is before all the players die. If you're the detective you can't be killed, so you just watch what happens and try to figure it out.

We ate pizza and drank soda. After that we played Mr. Smith's Remains. In this game everyone is blindfolded. Mom said that if anyone didn't want to be blindfolded, that was fine, as long as they didn't tell everyone else what was being passed around. So two girls decided to not be blindfolded. Anyway, then Mom read a poem about "Poor old Mr. Smith," and she passed around fruits and veggies and other things that felt like body parts, like peeled grapes for eyeballs, a cooked cauliflower for a brain, and cold spaghetti for intestines! We were all screaming, but it was fun.

We got a present from Shawn, and a card, just for having the party! The present was a box of chocolates. It was a pretty fun Halloween.

Mim's prior journal entries

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