Hello, everybody!

Estou aqui nos Estados Unidos, meio de férias e meio a trabalho, e semana passada escrevi um post sobre como foi minha primeira festa oficial de Halloween.

Durante minha viagem tenho conhecido pessoalmente amigos com quem só tinha contato pelo Skype e Facebook, como é o caso do Aaron Knight, do site Phrasemix, de onde reproduzo alguns posts aqui no blog. Como estamos na época de Halloween aqui o Aaron escreveu um post sobre algumas frases e expressões típicas sobre Halloween. O texto está em inglês e as palavras e expressões mais difíceis estão traduzidas, ok?

Halloween is a holiday that happens on October 31st each year. People dress up [se fantasiam] in strange costumes. Kids wear these costumes to walk around the neighborhood and ask their neighbors for candy. Adults go to parties or street fairs [feiras ao ar livre]. Here are some phrases that you might hear around Halloween:

Costumes

People wear costumes on Halloween.

They can either buy a pre-made costume [fantasia pronta] or make their own costume by hand [à mão].

You can dress up as:

• a ghost
• a witch
• a fireman
• a princess
• a mummy
• a vampire
• a zombie
• an alien
• a character from a movie
• someone who’s in the news

When you want to tell people about your costume, say:

I’m dressing up as a robot for Halloween. [Vou fantasiado de robô no Dia das Bruxas.]

Trick or treating

Kids go from door to door [vão de porta em porta], asking for candy. This is called going Trick or Treating. The kids knock on the door [batem à porta] or ring the doorbell [tocam a campainha]. When the door opens, they yell:

Trick or treat!

When kids show up at your door, you should ask them what their costume is:

What are you supposed to be? or Who are you dressed as? [Você veio fantasiado de quê?]

The candy that kids get can be:

• mini chocolate bars
• hard candy [bala]
• chewing gum
• suckers (also known as lollipops; these are hard candy on a stick) [pirulito]

There’s also one kind of candy that’s specific to Halloween. It’s called “candy corn”. It’s not really corn, just colored sugar formed into a little triangular shape that looks a little like a kernel of corn [um grão de milho]. Most people don’t really like it.

Other activities

Lots of people carve pumpkins [talhar abóboras]. A carved pumpkin is also called a jack-o-lantern. To do this, you:

• cut out a hole in the top of the pumpkin [faz um buraco no topo da abóbora]
• scoop the seeds out of it [tira as sementes]
• cut holes in the sides to make the shape of a face [faz buracos nos lados para ter a forma de um rosto]
• put a candle inside of it [coloca uma vela dentro]

You can also go to a haunted house [casa mal assombrada]. Real haunted houses are houses that have ghosts in them. But at Halloween, people sometimes put on a haunted house. They do things like:

• decorate some rooms in a building with cobwebs [teias de aranha]
• put fake [falso, de mentira] plastic spiders everywhere
• hang [pendurar] plastic bats from the ceiling
• play spooky [assustador] music
• turn the lights down low
• hide behind something wearing a costume, and then jump out to scare people who walk through

People often pay to walk through these fake haunted houses.

A word to use on Halloween
Boo! (to scare people suddenly)

Aaron Knight é o autor e ilustrador do site PhraseMix.com, um site que ensina o inglês com frases e expressões muito úteis do dia-a-dia. Já ensinou inglês nos Estados Unidos e Japão, para alunos de escolas regulares, faculdades e inglês para negócios. Aaron mora em Nova Iorque.