Hilltop brings back homemade festivities for Halloween

Natural and homemade entertainment attracted crowds to Hilltop Garden and Nature Center’s Second Annual Great Pumpkin Party on Saturday.

People smiled throughout the event, enjoying the sunshine and crisp winds. The number of attendees was about double from last year, said Judith Granbois, president of Hilltop Education Foundation, Inc.

Along with the homegrown pumpkins and decorative gourds from Hilltop’s pumpkin patch, there were hand-crafted contraptions such as an apple cider press and several fruit projecting catapults that entertained party guests.

“It’s cool how they’re making homemade apple cider,” freshman Jacob Koressel said.

When professor emeritus of microbiology George Hegeman moved to Bloomington in the 1970s, he bought an old orchard that had some apple trees on it. Unsure of what to do with all the apples, Hegeman invested in creating his own cider press.

The contraption grinds whole apples over a wheel. The juice filters through mesh taken from a gym bag. Hegeman said the gym bag mesh is washed many times after use, so if there is an extra kick in the cider, it is not from that.

“We’ve been watching for about 20 minutes,” Bloomington resident Sam Desollar said, sitting with his daughter Nell. “Sometimes we get sprayed with juice – it’s very exciting.”

The fresh cider was sweet without too much tang, although Hegeman said that a crisp, acidic taste is better for cider.

“Everything is so processed in stores. I just thought this was some juice, but it’s so great,” Spanish lecturer Ligia Belisario said.

After drinking a glass of the apple cider, Belisario said a Spanish phrase translated as “God-sent.”

She said the whole event was lovely for her because it was her first time seeing Americans celebrating Halloween in an original way.

“It’s not just dress-up and trick-or-treat,” she said.

In an open field next to Hilltop’s greenhouse, apples and pumpkins were not sent from above, but were sent overhead.

Jack Brubaker, a local blacksmith, and the Jack Creek Middle School Science Olympiad Team had their respective launching devices set up for kids to fling.

Most years there is a competition to see whose device can launch the farthest, but this year there were just three trajectories for recreational use.

“Sometimes pumpkins go straight up and come back down,” Brubaker said, explaining why launchers wore hard hats.

Kids dressed as Batman, princesses and frogs scurried to collect remnants of items that did not explode.

“Our friends are sleeping in because we spent all night watching horror movies,” sophomore David Lim said while carving a pumpkin with sophomore Tony Le. “But we didn’t want to stay at home on Halloween.”