Halloween

I’ve waited until the end of Halloween weekend in order to be able to provide a full recap of our goings-on this year. I think I can summarize by saying that as with most years, we did our best.

As a parent I have to say that I’m often a little depressed by the lack of effort that France puts into Halloween. To be fair, as an imported holiday it does not have the deep roots of other holidays here. But I do feel that, given that most other French holidays are Catholic, and therefore not actually observed by most of the population in any meaningful way, it would be nice to celebrate something together, and Halloween seems the perfect opportunity to do that.

We know that some Catholics feel that observing Halloween impedes on Toussaint, which is the Catholic holiday. But given that Halloween is the day before Toussaint, and that Halloween is simply a time to have fun, especially for kids, we hope that more people will come to realize that we can do both. Halloween is just an opportunity to play silly games, do some activities together, and let children get excited about dressing up in their costumes, and of course for trick-or-treating.

We always start a week or more before with the jack o’lanterns. I’m not an expert carver, but I’m able to do a basic design which guarantees I don’t go overboard and ruin the pumpkin. This year, I only found small pumpkins at the store, so I got four of those, and tried to share them with our friends. Needless to say, I was only partly successful. Thankfully, my wife found a big pumpkin, so we had our traditional public jack o’lantern outside our gate this week, in addition to some small ones decorating our house. Our neighbor actually did their own jack o’lantern this year, and they did a great job! Sadly I must not have sufficiently scraped the insides of some of the pumpkins, and they built up some fearsome mold by the end of the week. Thankfull they are now gone.

Other than that, we mostly just found some simple costumes for the kids. Daniel told us he wanted to be a pumpkin this year, which suited us just fine, as it’s a simple costume to find. Miriam found a cape and gloves with which she pretended to be a vampire. On Halloween night, the children put on their costumes underneath their coats, and we went out to the dark neighborhood, hoping to find someone handing out candy. No one in our neighborhood had a light on, but we did find a few houses in a nearby group that received our trick-or-treaters. In prior years, everything would have been fine, but now that Miriam is a little older, I could see that she felt a little disappointed by the few houses giving out candy.

Thankfully, when we got back, our neighbors had put out their fearsome jack o’lantern, and they gave the children a ton of candy. We finished off the holiday with our traditional viewing of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. We also watched Coco with Miriam, which was great way to finish off Halloween night. It’s a shame that we can’t have the big Halloween parties that I remember from my childhood, but I’m proud that we could at least establish some tradition for our children to remember fondly.