Tuesday Teatime

Happy Halloween!

Our teatime yesterday featured Halloween cookies from the grocery store, and apple cider. While thinking about Halloween poetry I remembered James Whitcomb Riley's Little Orphant Annie. Perfect!

My dad is a fan of Riley, and can recite Little Orphant Annie from memory. Having heard him recite it many times helped tremendously with being able to read it aloud -- I don't do well with dialect, and generally try to stay away from it in read alouds. But I had an internal sense of the rhythm of the poem, and even knew bits from memory myself.

I also read Riley's Old October and An Autumnal Tonic (the latter isn't in dialect; I chose it to show that the man could write in plain English, too). Then Kid1 requested The Bear, another piece my dad can recite from memory. Again, I don't think I could've done it justice with a cold reading had I not a memory of listening to my dad.

(And, yes, I called Dad later and told him about our teatime and his contributions.)

Then we got down to the serious business at hand -- Trick or Treat jokes. It's a St. Louis tradition for kids to tell jokes when they Trick-or-Treat (my theory: this may be a holdover from Martinmas celebrations, maybe from the German neighborhoods years ago).

Some we're considering:

What do you get when you cross Bambi and a ghost?

Bamboo.

What does a monster call humans?

Breakfast, lunch and dinner.

What do you call a fat jack-o-lantern?

A plumpkin.