October 2017 - Halloween party

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October 2017

Cześć !

 What do you know about Halloween in your country ? Let me give you some short explanations from my French point of view...
Halloween is a celebration that takes place on 31st October - the day before All Saints' Day. In France, it's a day when we can wear ghost, witch, pumpkin or skeleton costumes to ask for sweets in the shops and houses or attend to a party. We can also carve pumpkins to put a candle inside, tell frightening stories, watch horror movies or play divination games... This celebration is more or less popular according to the countries where you live.


This year, I wanted to make Polish children discover and enjoy this tradition at the library because this celebration is generally a great source of fun and joy for them and it was really popular in my country when I was younger. However, I forgot that Poland was a very catholic country which meant we encountered some resistance from people because this tradition was seen as disrespectful for the dead people we celebrate the day just after... You know, laughing and dancing while wearing a skeleton costume can shock and hurt people, we cannot joke about the deads (which I can understand). Anyway, I insisted because volunteers also go abroad to share their own culture and make local people discover something different from their everyday life and, lucky as I am with my wonderful team, we decided to try to organise a party at the library and see if some parents would be ready to let their children join us...

What a great idea we had to persist in that way when we saw the success it was ! We even organised a second Halloween party in a small library in Kosewo with even more children !


Susi - my Spanish flatmate who was volunteering in the cultural centre- helped me. We could plan whatever we wanted but we had to avoid skeletons and cemetery decorations...





What about the D-Day ? We prepared the room with handmade decorations, a lot of balloons and a thematic music. The children came with really great costumes. We proposed them a Halloween workshop: they could create a ghost thanks to a sheet of paper, a marker and some cotton. We also proposed face-painting and pictures with a handmade Halloween frame. The children could use one of the Halloween masks and accessories Susi made to bring even more fun to the pictures.







Susi also created a Mystery Box with holes and the children had to touch what was inside without seeing anything and guess what was hidden there. We had put jelly sweets which look like human eyes, jelly worms, a soft material in shape of spider's leg and other scaring things... but the children were super brave !

Finally, we concluded this Halloween celebration with the movie "Hotel Transylvania" and bags of popcorn !


 Angeline

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