Halloween in HuaiYa

I love Halloween. I only begrudgingly acknowledge that Halloween is not quite the equal of Thanksgiving and Christmas. It falls just a little short. But of course Halloween is leagues ahead of the next dearest holidays--Easter and 4th-o-July.





Well it is October, friends! And my motto is that if you wait until the 31st to celebrate Halloween, you're only eating the cherry on the hot fudge sundae... so all month I have been revelling in the universe of all things Halloween!

But where is Halloween in China? Where is Halloween in HuaiYa?! Not a trace of it! Autumn colors? No... the skies are rarely blue in the shadow of Mount TaiBai... and the leaves are still green or blandly yellow. And where are the pumpkins? HuaiYa doesn't have any... and if it did have some, they'd be these unrecognizably puny orange things... not pumpkins worthy of the masterful jack-o-lantern. Even my students have only vague ideas about what Halloween is and how we celebrate it in the West. It's ripe time to bring Halloween to HuaiYa!

Every Halloween must come with plenty of horror movies. I watched Saw IV last week, and it hit the spot more-or-less (where did I find Saw IV in China, you ask?... well you can read all about my adventures in the criminal activity of plundering honest artists of their intellectual property rights in a previous entry). In subsequent weeks, I have relied on Youtube to nourish the horror cravings. It works.

Then this week I thought of some ways to decorate my apartment. I went to the local fruit vendors searching for pumpkins, found none, and settled on oranges. They're round. They're orange. They're 1 kuai a jin... what have I got to lose? With a little sharpie work, I transformed them into makeshift jack-o-lanterns. Next, I bought up all the toilet paper in HuaiYa (not really). Within a couple hours, my flat was haunted with a hundred TP spirits!

TP Ghosts and orange-fruit jack-o-lanters haunt my flat.

One of the teachers visited my apartment the other afternoon and was a little surprised by the decorations. She didn't say whether she liked them or not... she only said that she had never seen anyone decorate for Halloween before. Yes!... this is exactly the problem! And I'm going to change that. As HuaiYa's self-designated Missionary of Halloween, I and my brain have stormed about methods for bringing the holiday into the classroom.

This week I created a lesson that taught my students the importance of being scared during Halloween. I showed them a brief but tension-loaded video clip from the movie Return of the Living Dead, and it worked as if by magic. They were gasping... closing their eyes... huddling together (male students included) ... some of the students even begged me to stop the video! Frightened students; happy teacher! Then we played a game (er, activity) that mixed monster vocabulary, speaking and listening practice, and "survival horror." Despite some issues with following directions, this game also went smoothly. In fact, at the end of my career here, I'm sure this activity will go down as one of the classics. For classes that played the game well and had time to spare, I rewarded them with a video clip from a haunted house and a video clip from a haunted hayride. In this way, these discovered that we crazy Westerners have invented MANY ways to scare ourselves in October. And to reinforce the point, throughout the lesson I tossed in the occasional "boo!" moments to shock-scare unsuspecting students... I swear, it was more fun than a human should legally be allowed to have!!!

And to cap it all off, one of my shy students today approached me this week to tell me how much he enjoys my class... that his other classes put him to sleep. Oh yeah son, now we're cookin' with gas!

Next week, we will have a more serious and textbook-oriented lesson, but there's no reason I can't keep the Halloween theme alive... especially during the most exciting week in October! I have used the other half of HuaiYa's supply of toilet paper to make "trick-or-treat ghosts." In each ghost is wrapped a surprise... a treat or a trick. Most ghost are treats with an assortment of candy options. Some are filled with less desireable--dare I say boring--treats, like peanuts or sunflower seeds. And some are filled with "tricks"... empty candy wrappers... rice... some have nothing in them. I intend to use these ghosts not only as ambassadors of Halloween but also as motivation... the surprise alone should encourage more students to participate. We'll see.

They're easy to make. You just wrap some item in toilet paper--securing it and twisting it until it looks like a ghost. A small piece of tape seals the little buggers. I have made a wide assortment of these things... tall ghosts and short ghosts; fat ghosts and skinny ghosts; heavy ghosts and light ghosts; angry ghosts and sad ghosts. A good blend of unpredictabiity to increase the surprise factor. As I say, they are easy to make... which is a necessary consideration when you have +/-1,200 students!

These are the "trick-or-treat ghosts"... 3 down, at least 157 more to go..

A missionaries work is hard, but he's glad to do it. In the name of bringing Halloween to HuaiYa, it is all worth it!... let's just hope he's not burnt out for Thanksgiving and Christmas...

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

UPDATE: Some of my students tell me there is a haunted house in nearby Xi'an. What I cannot decipher is whether they intend to say that there is a haunted house of the style we visit in the weeks approaching Halloween or that it is a haunted house that is genuinely "haunted" by some ghost or spirit. If I can only nail down the details and confirm this haunted house's whereabouts, I will be on the next bus to Xi'an--that's a promise.