Trick-or-Treat!

October 31

If you’ve never attempted to explain the concept of Halloween and trick-or-treating to someone who is unfamiliar with the holiday, you may not realize how absurd it sounds.

Kids seek out the scariest costume they can find –the more fake blood and guts, the better –and are sent out into the dark night to knock on strangers’ doors and return hyped up on an unhealthy amount of sugar with the high likelihood they will wake in the middle of the night with nightmares.

Hmm.

Although this wasn’t exactly the way we portrayed the holiday to our 10^th grade ACCESS students at our Halloween program, it made me think about the holidays and how we choose to celebrate them in the U.S. After many hours of planning with the other ETAs, our program was a hit. Our students enjoyed ghost stories, mask making and Halloween themed English grammar lesson (yes, yes, you role your eyes, but we first won them over with candy!).

My attempts to introduce a few Halloween “essentials” to my Nepali family were not quite as successful. At home, my family would spend a few hours huddled around the kitchen table, each person planning the perfect jack-o-lantern design. As we got older the designs got more and more intricate (sometimes to Dad’s chagrin, since he would be left with carving the itty bitty cutouts we insisted upon).

So, I thought, what better way to introduce Halloween than carving a jolly ol’ Jack for the kitchen table? However, after setting up the carving station and going to look for a knife (it seems like this is one thing our handy dandy chulessi isn’t suitable for), I returned to the kitchen to find that my soon to be jack-o-lantern was turned into dinner!

The way I see it, my family is simply getting into the Halloween spirit with the trick-or-treating! Perhaps we’ll have a bit more luck celebrating Thanksgiving…