Halloween

This year for Halloween, we packed up the van, headed over the mountains, and spent the weekend hiking.  The kids were so busy exploring the canyon below our rented cabin, any thoughts of costumes or vague stories about trick-or-treating disappeared entirely from their minds.  My husband, mother, and I relaxed around the fake fireplace that evening, enjoying our peaceful and quiet Halloween night.

Our first Halloween with children was six years ago, and so far, we haven't done trick-or-treating or the mainstream cultural activities.  On different years we have chosen some different activities, and most of them have included a costume for Sunflower and something social.  This is first year with all three children, and the first year that any of the children could really absorb stories from their peers and figure out that they might be missing out on something.  So why did we choose this year to skip the holiday entirely?

I'm sure the kids would have had some joyful moments and happy memories, but I felt like they would be overshadowed by "yucky" feelings.  (As my kids so eloquently lump together all the feelings they don't want to discuss!)  I forsaw both positives and negatives for the younger kids, but I think it would have been the most difficult for Hibiscus.

First of all, anything out of the ordinary is difficult for Hibiscus.  She is a sensory and emotional seeker, always wanting bigger and stronger experiences and feelings, but although she craves them, they don't make her happy.  She is most calm, and therefore the most able to focus, accomplish something she can be proud of, and socially successful, in her very structured school environment.  She looks forward to family parties and celebrations, but once we actually get there, she gets revved up until she spends most of the time skittering from one person and activity to another; Daddy or I have to follow her with constant reminders to keep her within even loose parameters of socially acceptable behavior; and pretty much every special event ends with a toddler-style meltdown.  And these are family gatherings, where there are only ten people or so, most of whom are calm adults and familiar to Hibiscus!

With Halloween, we are now entering our first big season of American holidays.  October through January, major events follow each other in quick succession, each of which is full of things that children are supposed to do, and even supposed to feel.  Imagine how confusing this season would be to any immigrant!  Hibiscus is at a particularly difficult age, where she is old enough to be expected to participate fully and independently in all the activities, and yet young enough that she is unable to learn by abstracts: she needs the chance to experience the holiday, which she has never had.  She doesn't have the type of personality where she can stand off to the side, watch, and learn for a few minutes; she would need to be just as much in the middle as any second grader, but she doesn't know what's going on.  It's a difficult connundrum.

Add into that her sensory and planning issues -- she is constantly getting uneven and unusual stimulus from even normal events, missing some feelings and cues and being overwhelmed by other normal ones (sensory processing issues), and is unable to plan ahead, calm her own body, or put events in a larger context.  Every day life is constantly confusing for Hibiscus; special events must be a nightmare.  Except a nightmare that she wants to enjoy!

So, at the beginning of October, I was feeling like if we were going to skip some of the holiday season, Halloween would be a good one, simply because I'm not that attached to it.  But as the month went on, it became apparent that Halloween would present even more challenges than usual.

Many children and adults enjoy the feeling of being slightly scared, and then overcoming their negative feelings and feeling even more powerful afterwords.  Halloween is a time to celebrate those feelings, and push ourselves to see how scared we can be and still feel good afterwords.  I admit that I myself am not one of those people, and I have never enjoyed scary movies or creepy pictures.  My children all seem to be following closely in my footsteps, and as we drove around town, even a smiling skelton decoration, passed at 30 mph, invoked strong "that's yucky! I don't like that! make it go away!"  We live in a college town, where a lot of people enjoy their gory decorations, and as the holiday gets closer, they become happy to supplement it with inappropriately sexy.  Well, the sexy is their own issue in their frat parties or wherever they end up, but when it's walking down the street at one in the afternoon, it is inappropriate regarding the conversations I need to have with my school-age children!  Gone is the age when I can distract them with singing a song about pumpkins while we pass a pack of vampires with their thong underwear showing.  My kids are really good at questions!

Short of thong underwear, the costumes and dressing up is something I'm willing to celebrate about Halloween.  I think that it is positive for children to have a chance to turn into something else, and dressing up as animals or story-book characters is an empowering experience for them.  However, as the holiday approached, it became clear this wasn't to go over smoothly, either.  My kids regularly don capes, blankets, and scarves to "turn into" different characters, and if everyone's costumes were at this playful level, they would have all had fun.  But many people enjoy the opportunity that Halloween provides to transform themselves more completely, which is wonderful.  Except my kids are still figuring out who people are in the first place!  It became clear as we saw various semi-costumes that Hibiscus was really upset by things and people turning into something else, and I would guess that Buttercup would have felt the same way.  And why wouldn't they?  Our entire culture is still less than a year old to them.  When you're just figuring out what someone's role is and how to treat them, wouldn't you get mad if they suddenly became something else -- especially something you have never seen before?

Furthermore, play-acting about scary things is much more fun when you don't believe they are really, truly, real.  For most of us, we might hear a weird sound in the woods or see shadows in a dark room, and our minds might jump to thoughts of monsters or spirits, but then our rational minds quickly say "ghosts aren't real."  This helps us to calm down, and American children as young as 5 or so use this self-calming process.  But in Uganda, like in much of Africa, this self-soothing technique doesn't exist: evil DOES walk the earth in bodily form.  Rather than parents comforting their children by turning on lights and reading cheering stories, Ugandan parents warn their children not to go out after dark so the witches don't grab them.  And children really ARE taken by witches!  Even I was warned about the common kidnapping grounds near our house.  Every single person I talked with, even the most educated and the most devout Christian, believed in witchcraft and took it seriously.  In fact, living in Uganda changed my own views about witchcraft and black magic as well.  All that probably works out to be another chapter in this blog, but it is probably a huge reason that although they have imported many of our traditions, there is no Ugandan equivalent to a day when you run around pretending to play with evil spirits.  They were accepted to be there in daily life, and that the main goal was to AVOID them.  All three of my children were immersed in this culture and these beliefs, Hibiscus to the greatest extent.  It only just occurs to me as I'm writing this, that this is probably why Sunflower was more upset by Halloween "decorations" this year than he was when he was only three.

The children's Waldorf school puts on a little Hallween/harvest festival celebration every year.  I hear that it is very sweet, and is along the lines of costumed children walking through a hay bale path, following the life cycle of wheat, and ending with a hot bun to eat.  I saw other second-grade parents preparing for their skit, which was amusing and involved flute music.  I was advised by many families that this was a fun and pleasant event, and my children would be fine there.  I agreed that something like that sounded relatively enjoyable, although there is still the problem of Hibiscus getting so over-excited.  For children who prefer to avoid the scary element of Halloween, festivals like that, and some of the Harvest festivals put on by the big churches, are probably a good alternative.  But for my children, who are truly terrified of the evil represented by the skeletons and witches, and have come too close to their own deaths and those of their loved ones which the coffins and skeletons recollect, I did not think even a distant brush with the mainstream celebration was going to be healthy or happy.



So we decided to just escape Halloween this year.  Out in the high desert, there were no scary skeletons and no adults expecting specific but unusual behavior.  We spent most of the weekend outside, which is the easiest place for intense little children to be successful.  There were still issues of which child got to be the hiking leader, and who was pushing whom, and whether or not it was a good idea to play in the rushing, frigid, river.  Our cabin had an usually steep ladder which just BEGGED to be climbed in unsafe ways, and one post-hike restaurant dinner was fraught with complications, like a spilled water glass and an unreasonable tantrum.  But these are ordinary trials, easily overcome, and overall everyone was active, lively, happy, and healthy.  We climbed the beautiful but most challenging trails at Smith Rock, and all three children were proud of themselves and the power in their little bodies.  I heard questions about Halloween and costumes before our trip, but they faded completely once we were doing something else, which shows that the concerns weren't rooted very deeply for my children.

Some day, we will do something to acknowledge the end of October.  Perhaps it will be with Waldorf School and Harvest Festivals.  Perhaps we will be invited to take part in an actual celebration of Dia de los Muertos or Samhain, which I think have the advantages of dealing honestly with the serious issues which are raised by the season.  Some day, I'm sure we'll go out trick-or-treating -- if for no other reason than to say we have done it!

But maybe in the meanwhile, we'll make it a family tradition to go climb a mountain on the last day of October.  The year is ending, the weather is cold, but we and our bodies are true to ourselves, and strong.  Being strong is good for little children!