Happy Halloween to all of you in the Northern Hemisphere! We experienced a Southern Hemisphere Halloween last night and I must say, there are some MARKED differences!
Firstly, the climate. As you know, it is Spring here in Oz and so it feels like Easter or Canada Day rather than the cool temperatures we typically have at this time of year. The landscape is also very lush and green and the air is filled with the perfumed scent of many roses and flowers. Instead of bare branches on our trees, they are a lovely green and many have fragrant blossoms on their branches. Also, the days are getting longer ,so rather than being dark and spooky by 6pm, it was bright as midday still at 6:30.
Secondly, Halloween is a "new" holiday here. Stores are not busting with decorations, costumes and candy from August onward. You find the odd little item but not much. As mentioned previously, the local grocery store carried orange pumpkins for the first time this year. The pumpkins were advertised as being for Halloween and gave instructions for carving a jack-o-lantern. Some people remarked that "it's just not Australian" and abstain from the celebration and all of its trappings. It is kind of surprising to me that such a "lolly loving" nation, wouldn't hop on the Halloween ghost (gravy) train and fill up on sugar this one night of the year but I can see how the calendar timing doesn't fit.
Luckily for us, our school celebrated Halloween this year with loads of fun! I provided some history of Halloween to the teachers and it was decided that we would have an orange and black dress up day and some Halloween stations that the entire school could experience. We did this on Friday, October 28.
The dress up day included a coin drive to raise money for the Missions - a great fundraiser! There are 3 house teams in our school and the house that covered its flag with the most coins earned points for their team. It didn't matter if they were only 5 cent pieces, it was about the number of COINS, not the total amount of money. It was great to see all the orange and black around - even in nearly 30 degree temperatures.
The school was divided into 14 teams and the rotations began. Some examples of stations were apple bobbing (the water was refreshing), a toilet paper mummy wrap, costume relay, create a monster, musical pumpkins and many more! It was so fun and I think the kids got a feel for what Halloween is all about. We had some Halloween fun for about 2 hours and it was great! 
After the stations were finished, my class looked at Artist Pablo Picasso and cubism and then created some spooky Picasso Monsters! FUN!
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I even flavoured our weekly staff meeting with this Halloween prayer...
This picture slideshow personalized with Smilebox |
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