I’ve always been an avid bookworm, a bitter artist/writer, and a die-hard gamer.  In fact, I was a gamer before gaming was cool.  I was reading at the age of two and doing math at three, so I suppose it only made sense to my parents that my first board game should be Dungeons and Dragons.  To this day, when my entire family gets together, our ‘family game night’ is an epic D&D campaign.  My husband and I cannot wait for our girls to be ready to play D&D, too.  And, as I mentioned, I love to read.  I will read anything’even an encyclopedia volume can be entertaining.  I was the kid who was grounded from reading, because my parents realized that if they grounded me from anything else, I’d just read.  Getting grounded from reading taught me to find a new outlet: writing fiction and drawing pictures.  I suppose there is no real prison for an imaginative person.

Today for dinner I had ten-bean chili, which my husband made.  Since we are making a move to eat healthy and to reduce the amount of red meat that is in our diet, he made vegetarian chili.  We have a small patio garden in which we grow some of our own vegetables, and so he was able to include some chiles, onions, and garlic that we had grown ourselves.  In lieu of meat, he added diced mushrooms and yellow corn.  Although the chili shared a lot of the same spices as most chili recipes, he also added some ground mustard seed, which adds some zing to the flavor, and pimenton (Spanish smoked paprika), which lends a smoky taste.  With this chili, collard greens make an excellent side.

What’s even more interesting is that, outside Europe, the same time of year still has the same purpose.  The Hindu holiday of Diwali, for instance, falls around Halloween; it is a night when every candle in the house is lit to welcome Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, into the devotees’ homes for another year of prosperity.  As with the pagan Halloween, there is much feasting.  Similarly, El Dia de Muerte (meaning ‘The Day of the Dead’), the Mexican-Aztec syncretic holiday, usually falls on Halloween and is celebrated with costumes and feasting.  As with Halloween, the Aztecs believed that this day opened a gateway to the afterlife, and the dead would return to visit their loved ones.  I find it interesting that distinct and diverse cultures would place a similar spiritual emphasis on roughly the same day.