A Supersized Halloween

Hello all,

Yes, I am back.  And for all of our sakes I'm not going to even try to justify my blog absence.  You get busy.  I get busy.  Life grabs us and drags us off to work or family responsibilities.   The story is always the same, with just the pieces moved around.  So I'll just get into it.

Halloween back in California is usually a nighttime event that rarely goes very far beyond Halloween night.  If one is a child or a teacher, Halloween might extend into the daytime hours in school events, but since school celebrations of most kinds back at home  are slowly being swept out the proverbial classroom door, Halloween is mostly being narrowed down into an evening event.

Which means costume parties for teens and adults, macabre house decorations and trick or treating, either conventionally door to door,  or for safety's sake, car trunk to car trunk or booth to booth.

Here in Japan Halloween is slowly being adopted as an event.   Halloween decorations, costumes and candy appear in stores in early October  and many neighborhoods put together costume parades for the kids, with local businesses handing out treats.

Trick or treating, however, is mostly a big head-scratcher here.

But if the KIS Halloween celebrations this year are any indication, things may not necessarily stay that way.

This year I am teaching Kinderarten, which means that this year Halloween is once again a THING in my life.

My school, Kyoto International School (or KIS) traditionally invites our sister school down from the mountains to join us for a day of Halloween costume fashion shows, games, pumpkin carving and treats.  In return they perform a dance for us, and then later in the winter invite us to their school to join them for their Winter Festival.

This year's Halloween started out much the same.  Patrick and Aya volunteered this year as helpers, and spent the day hopping from classroom to classroom to gym to field, helping out whatever class needed  an extra hand.  Excited kids put on  costumes, played games, ate way too many treats and generally had a great time.

However this year was different.  This year KIS is in a temporary new school while our usual school building is being renovated.  Our "new" school had been, until this past March when it closed, the heart of the neighborhood and the local school since 1869.  

So we came up with a plan to help ease our way into the neighborhood--invite the former students of our school site to join us for Halloween.  But since all of them now attend different schools, any event we invited them to had to be in the early evening

And thus it was.

So after a day of Halloween hilarity, our students stayed at school, ate Parent Association sponsored pizza for dinner, and then slipped back on their costumes for an evening of trick or treating.

Yes, trick or treating.

Around 10 or 12 neighborhood businesses offered to give out treats (which our parent association collected in truly mind-boggling amounts).     All of our teachers, most of our parents, our Middle school students  and Patrick and Aya stationed themselves along the streets with flashlights to make sure all the kids stayed safe.

Lo and behold, it was trick or treating.  And it didn't feel like pretend trick or treating, as it could all too easily fall into.  Everyone was really into the scene--from the business owners to the kids to the parents to the neighbors who popped out of their houses to watch the spectacle of nearly 70 kids marching down the street in costume lugging overloaded bags of treats.

It was noisy and silly and chaotic and exhausting....and fantastic.

I'm not saying that Japan needs to adopt trick or treating, or Halloween, or really any of the holidays that seem to make their way into the stores and pop culture here. It's not my place to dictate what foreign holidays Japan adopts or doesn't adopt.

 But there was something touching and lovely about seeing so many people just enjoying being a part of the unbridled joy that kids feel on Halloween.

Because beneath the costumes, the candy, the spooks both hilarious  and terrifying, Halloween is simply about letting ourselves be silly and have fun.  And I tend to believe that sharing in some simple silly fun is a great way to make new friends.



Until next time,
Christina