The Pork Boys Do Halloween 2013

We celebrated Halloween a couple of days early at my best friend M.P.'s house this week.  I didn't get any pics of the main dishes - a Cajun meatloaf studded with chicken giblets and hardboiled eggs, okra creole, spaetzle with tomato gravy, bananas-foster ice cream and pumpkin-cream cheese pie for dessert, all of it homemade from scratch - but I did get some good pics of the appetizers and of M.P.'s usual fabulous table decorations to fit the occasion.  Take a look:

The appetizers, clockwise from the top:  deviled monster eggs, hot chili & queso dip, tortilla chips and black-bean dip, fresh pumpkin seeds.  M. P. made the butcher-block countertop to fit over a low cabinet, from two kinds of wood painstakingly cut, sanded, glued, clamped, and framed.

M. P. and I both love deviled eggs, and every year for Halloween he comes up with ways of making little monster heads with them - very cute.

M. P. always sets a beautiful table for our little feasts.

The centerpiece of this year's Halloween decorations was the charming border M. P. made out of different colors of construction paper, on the gum-wrapper chain principle - very, very elegant, I thought.  He also made matching coaster rings and napkin rings of the same materials.

Note the other handmade pieces by M. P. in the background:  at center, beyond the dining table, is a witch's hat, and at the far right on the sideboard (and partly out of the frame) is a luminaria of a haunted house, made from a black piece of paper with several painstaking cut-outs for windows and doors.

So pretty.

M. P. also dotted the rest of the room with quite a few other Halloween decorations, as you can see, which adds much to the enjoyment of the meal itself.

M. P. is a trained artist, among other things, and always makes such nice, happy jack o'lantern faces.

The geometric shapes of the jack o'lantern echo those of the table, also made from scratch by M. P., as are all the tables in the living-dining room.

The cozy electric fireplace always adds its cheery warmth to our dinners together in the cooler months of the year - sometimes we like to run it even in summer, without the heat feature, just for the pretty glow of the fire. 
M. P. built the mantel shelf and overmantle himself.