Korean kids get scary on Halloween

And so do their teachers. yes, it’s true. Korean kids do celebrate Halloween. But only if they go to a private English academy, like the one we teach in. And let me tell you, these places go all out for this totally American holiday experience. For Halloween with our kids, we did the following over a period of 10 days:

1) Three elaborate Halloween art projects, all made out of various black and orange paper, definitely including a mask of a bunny (for girls) and a dog (for boys) and a stupid witch hat that involved using far too much hot glue and sustaining a variety of second-degree burns.

2) One science project that turned out to actually be an art project because it involved making a glow-in-the-dark clock for which we had to mix together some unknown yellowish powder with glue to make a kind of paint/paste. This was, of course, very toxic – as is nearly every material in our science projects – and caused my eyes and hands to itch and turn red. Woohoo! (The full explanation of such projects requires a much longer explanation than I can really get into here. Perhaps later).

3) One pumpkin carving session that involved the kids standing around one table while I scooped out the pumpkin guts and they got to mush their hands around in it as I carved up the pumpkin’s little face. This blew their minds.

4) One GIANT package from my mom, Adrienne Magee, the World’s Most Prepared Kindergarten Teacher, that contained lots of little presents for my kids but which I ended up accidentally using to scare the kids just a bit. You see, we had been talking about Halloween and Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead, for all you non-Mexican holiday literate folks) for a week or so when the package arrived. They wanted me to open it right away as they were dying to know what was inside. As a joke, I told them that there might be some ghosts inside. I wasn’t really sure. But it was Halloween that week, so it was possible, I guessed. At that point, almost all of my kids shrieked in horror and jumped back to the wall, tripling the size of our circle. But one kid, Sean, who has an older brother and sister and comes to school singing Avril Lavigne every day, he scooted right up next to me, put his hands on his hips, looked me dead center and said “Open it, Teacher. Open it.” I loved it. It was awesome. I kept peeking in the box and looking up with great surprise as I quickly closed it again. I assured them, though, that if there were ghosts in the box, they would be nice ghosts. It was a package from my mom, after all. My mom wouldn’t send us mean ghosts, I said. Finally, I opened the box, and found all kinds of amazing goodies inside – spider rings, glow-in-the-dark rings, moulds to make Mexican sugar skulls and a beautiful book telling the story about the Day of the Dead.

5) Halloween Day – kids and teachers all came to school dressed in their Halloween finest. And they all call it Halloween Day. I don’t know why. I won the award for “Person Who Scared the Most Children and Adults” in my Dia de los Muertos skeleton costume (thank you, emalie, for the inspiration!). The kids came as various Snow Whites, Harry Potters, strange robots and Spidermans. There were some costumes at the local Target-esque stores, but some parents bought their kids stuff from the interweb. We had to go through a very elaborate trick-or-treating process where all the classes from the 5th floor came down to the 4th and then vice versa. I made a lovely little mix of Halloween creepy songs – “Thriller,” “Ghostbusters,” “Purple People Eater,” and “The Monster Mash” of course. It was pretty hilarious. Especially since I kept scaring the pants off these kids. The best part of my costume was the f*ed up make-up I had found to create the super scary skeleton look. When I started putting it on in the morning, I noticed that it felt kind of weird on my skin, almost like plastic. It started to dry, and it felt like a facial mask does – tightening on my skin and drying up so I could hardly move my face. By the time I had finished, I couldn’t smile and definitely couldn’t laugh. I tried to eat a piece of toast and my face cracked. At school, it got so bad that I just had to start peeling off my face. This scared the children even more, as you can imagine. I was half flesh, half white skeleton. It was bizarre. I also made this bouquet of fake roses with marigolds that I put a white candle in the middle of. I carried it around with me, lit, as we walked to each classroom. The kids loved it and wanted to take a picture with it.

The final touch was a special Dia de los Muertos party for my kids. (For those of you who don’t know, the holiday is celebrated on Nov 1st and 2nd every year. It involves remembering your ancestors who have died by visiting their graves and having a giant party in the cemetery with music, food and dancing. People create amazing altars in their homes, and in many places, there are big parades where people dress up and carry candles and marigolds – the scent of which the dead are believed to follow to the celebrations each year. I’m not Mexican, but it’s been a big holiday for me living in Tucson, AZ, and in San Francisco. I wanted to share it with my kids, too). I had been talking to them about it for weeks, and since they do very similar things in Korea when one of their relatives dies, they really got the idea pretty clearly, I think. One of my kids had been to visit his grandfather’s grave recently, so he explained to the kids what he did when they went – lots of bowing, eating, etc.

To prep for the day, I pulled together a bunch of things to set up an altar in my room. I hung up the great calaveras (or skeleton) banners in my room. And I took on the crazy task of making sugar skulls in my kitchen with all of the stuff that my mom sent me. This was, of course, far more work that I imagined, and I was definitely channeling Adrienne the Star Kindergarten Teacher the whole time. The skulls were a little ghetto as I definitely do not have the fancy pastry tools that one would want to have when making such intricate, delicate things, but they turned out pretty nicely. And I had the inspiration to wrap some cardboard in tin foil and glue the skulls to it so they wouldn’t fall apart. Mexican cowboys for the boys and Santa Caterina for the girls. I was pretty proud of myself.

I made up some yummy hot chocolate, bought some oranges and baked treats to share with the kids, and set up the altar in the morning before they came to the classroom. The altar was quite lovely. I had placed a picture of my grandmother on it along with some sugar skulls and a bunch of little marigolds I picked from outside the school. But this was the best part – when the kids came in, two of my boys went over to the altar, immediately knew what it was for, and started bowing. On their knees, hands on the ground in prostration to this little altar. And then five or six kids did it, and then everybody wanted to do it. “Catie Teacher’s grandmother?” they asked. Yes, I said. She died when I was just about as old as you. And I watched them bow, and I laughed, and I had to try hard to hold back some tears, too. It was truly a beautiful moment.

Later, one of the younger classes came down to my room, and we all read the storybook my mom had sent and then drank the hot chocolate. Of course, it was immediately all over the floor and all over three kids shoes. Sticky chocolate everywhere. But what a wonderful day. It was a ton of work that I definitely did not have to do, but since when have I stopped at just doing what I’m supposed to do?

Here's a close up of the altar. A little memoriam to Alice Catherine, my nana.