Cancel the pumpkin
Much mockery about this story of a primary school canceling a Halloween parade:
An elementary school in Seattle has cancelled its annual Halloween parade this year as the event “marginalises students of colour who do not celebrate the holiday”.
The Benjamin Franklin Day Elementary School’s racial equity team decided to cancel the “Pumpkin Parade”, where students dress up in Halloween costumes, after deliberating for five years. Parents were told about their decision on 8 October through a newsletter.
…
In the newsletter sent to parents, the school noted that costume parties could become uncomfortable for some students and distract them from learning.
Halloween events create a situation where some students must be “excluded for their beliefs, financial status, or life experience”, the school said. “It’s uncomfortable and upsetting for kids”. According to nonprofit organisation GreatSchools, 15 per cent of the students at the elementary school belong to low-income families.
So it’s not so much about students of color as it is about students of not much money. Here’s a shocker: I don’t think this decision is absurd; on the contrary, I wonder why schools need “Halloween parades” in the first place. Halloween is a pseudo-holiday that’s been inflating absurdly over the past…I don’t know, decade? Couple of decades? So apparently schools are joining in, but that seems stupid to me. Halloween is basically about demanding candy from the neighbors. It’s also about the fun of dressing up, but what’s that got to do with school? Nothing.
Holidays are all, without exception, gigantic marketing opportunities, and that’s how they get so ridiculously inflated. Somebody is making a fortune out of conning people into buying yards and yards of white fluff that is supposed to suggest cobwebs and spoils the appearance of October front gardens. Schools don’t need to observe Halloween.
I agree. Valentine’s Day is another. It can be very painful for unpopular kids.
I always had trouble coming up with costume ideas, and the ones in stored were pretty awful in the late sixties, early nineties. Couldn’t see out of the plastic masks for shit.
Even now, I avoid costume parties.
And yet, the reasons given for the cancellation are still ridiculous.
Wow, apparently a party will distract the students from learning. You don’t say.
True, but I suppose they didn’t feel they could say “Why were we ever doing this in the first place?!”
My mother taught elementary school starting back in the 1950s and into the 1980s and she recalled to me recently how Halloween was an even bigger deal to the kids than Christmas. Of course my mom didn’t go for expensive costumes in class and provided materials for the kids to do their own DIY costumes, which made it a fun learning exercise in both craft and art. Those were more DIY times back then I suppose, but it could still be done.
Halloween isn’t really a pseudo-holiday. Sure, we don’t celebrate it the way we did in Ye Olde Dayse, but the same can be said of most holidays. These young whipper snappers! Back in my day, we walked through snowy forests to find our Christmas trees and carried them back the same way.
J.A.: The DIY-ness of costumes (clothes in general, really) seems to have disappeared outside of cosplay. My mother sewed my costumes when I was a kid, just like she sewed her dresses, darned socks, and mended clothes. And that was much more recent than the 50s.
I knew that (that it’s really All Hallows) but I suppose what I meant was that it’s never been even slightly a religious holiday in my memory (and pre-me obviously doesn’t count). Plus that it’s never (in my memory etc) been an official one as in Paid Day Off. It’s been a Thing of some sort but not a real holiday.
The homemade kind is brilliant. I think I may have mentioned here before the time my mother curtained off a bit of our attic under the eaves (18th century farmhouse, so very atticky attic) and did all kinds of spooky things for a little afternoon celebration with some friends. Good times.
Halloween is big on our block. The guy on the corner spends the whole month decorating, and we have to close off the block to accommodate everyone. We never have enough candy. Sometimes I ask the kids what the trick is, but they never know what to answer.
My mother told us that in her town in upstate New York back in the thirties, kids would go around on Halloween tipping over outhouses. Apparently that sort of behavior was typical, and that was a major motivation for having more organized activities, including handing out candy.
In my experience, the opposite is happening. When I was a kid, Halloween was huge, with neat costumes and trick-or-treating, plus of course the Trick-or-Treat for UNICEF. I have seen fewer trick-or-treaters each year, I don’t see as many churches doing Halloween parties or even anti-Halloween parties as there were in the nineties when my son was in his last days of Halloween. Last year we had no children show up, but I suppose that was because of COVID, but we were getting fewer each year, so…smaller, not bigger. I suppose in some places it could be getting bigger.
I decorated for Halloween in my classroom, partially because we’re tired of school tours avoiding our building because “it’s old and ugly” (It’s the newest building on campus, actually, but yes, it is ugly). And also because in our training on diversity, we have been told a thousand things we can’t do, which appears to start with not failing kids who don’t do work (I ignore that one) and not wearing what we feel most comfortable in for fear it might trigger someone (I’ve debated coming naked, but I don’t want to do that, especially now that we have dropped to below freezing temperatures). No one specifically mentioned Halloween, but they talked about not being able to decorate with anything that might trigger, so now, while I have no desire to cause anyone emotional harm, I have never had a student triggered by having fake bats hanging from the ceiling and fake witches on the walls. I would like them to come tell me, in person, that I cannot have this, and then let them face the students.
And I’ve discovered a lot of people from other cultures (in our school, that is almost exclusively faculty; most of the Hispanic children are second, third, or fourth generation and were born here. They are more American than anything else) seem quite fine with doing cultural things like Halloween. One of our faculty, from Syria, and Islamic, said he enjoys Christmas, Hanukkah, Easter, etc. He says he likes doing holidays, and he is willing to celebrate anyone’s holiday. Our new instructor, from China, finds Halloween delightful and plans to take her kids out this year.
Once again we find school administrators worrying about something kids will be uncomfortable with before they bother finding out if kids are uncomfortable with it. And as someone growing up poor, I loved Halloween because it was the one time you could dress different than other kids and be okay. It was the one time I could fit in. We didn’t buy expensive costumes; only a small percentage of the other kids in our school had elaborate, expensive costumes, and my school was rich. A lot of them were do-it-yourself, put together by the kids themselves.
Whether there is a good reason to ban Halloween or not (this is one place where I disagree with Ophelia, because I think it helps create connections), the reasons they give are crappy ones.
Welp, youse guys are persuading me to rethink this.
By inflation I guess I meant the front yards, specifically the ugly store-bought crap in front yards, especially “cobwebs” and the rotting corpses theme. But homemade costumes and festive parties are another matter.
Like many of our holidays, before it was a religious thing (a Holy Day), it was a change-of-seasons thing. Or maybe the connection between seasons and imagined deities go back to our earliest days as a species. I dunno.
But as a former school child I wish to go on record saying that (secular) school celebrations and class parties are both fun and worthwhile. Aside from the welcome relief from routine, they offer opportunities for creative play and a sense of community.
But mostly they’re fun. (And dammit you don’t have to be rich to create (or even buy) costumes. Nor are costumes mandatory.)
Except Valentine’s Day. That holiday, even if you like it (or love it), does not belong in schools. Grade school children giving other kids valentines is creepy. I was the kid who never got valentines, and it hurt. And everyone knew I didn’t get any, and that hurt. And everyone knew it hurt. So now the teachers force the kids to buy valentines for everyone. So what the hell does it mean, anyway? You’re following orders? Yeah, that really convinces a kid they have friends, right? That they don’t look or talk weird or different, that they aren’t the poorest student in class, or a minority, or a weirdo (whatever that means in any generation’s vernacular).
Keep Halloween, it’s just fun. Get rid of Valentine’s Day, because it’s stupid to have in the schools, and it’s a source of harm. It certainly was for me, and not because my culture didn’t celebrate it, but because they did.
And you know what? I bet the kids who come from a culture that doesn’t celebrate Halloween loves the party…it’s usually their parents who don’t. And add in parties for other cultures, which kids from our white Anglo culture don’t celebrate. We’ll learn to celebrate diversity. That’s a good thing.
I’d say that Halloween is getting bigger but lazier, here in the UK. We have fewer trick or treaters but more tat and the hype is starting earlier each year.
One of the things I’ve noticed about Halloween now vs when I was a kid, is the changes in the candy available. For example, the repurposing of Easter candy as Halloween candy. Easter eggs became buzzard eggs. Halloween peeps. Buzzard nests.
Hah! Buzzard eggs, yum.
“I knew that (that it’s really All Hallows) but I suppose what I meant was that it’s never been even slightly a religious holiday in my memory (and pre-me obviously doesn’t count).”
I think that’s actually part of the appeal, especially for schools. An entirely secular holiday is basically the least controversial way to have a classroom celebration. Most schools have finally figured out that having a Christmas or Easter celebration can easily cross into constitutional issues, but Halloween? Totally safe.
That said, I’m willing to bet that at least part of the school’s concern, here, is the difficulty of policing the costumes. Not just the issue of rich kids who can go to an actual costume shop and get something top-of-the-line, vs. the kids who end up looking like Charlie Brown because they had to cut up their own sheet to end up as a multi-eyed ghost that everyone thinks is a potato. But also the problems of cultural insensitivity and political controversy–kids showing up dressed like 50s Hollywood Indians, say, or the oh-so-clever parent who sends their kid as some political figure, whether it be an effort to mock or to exalt.
An elementary school, at least, is unlikely to have to worry about a flood of “Sexy X” ‘costumes’.
Actually, I’d say that last one is probably emblematic of the biggest ‘change’ I’ve seen in Halloween since I was a kid. It used to largely be a children’s holiday; even teenagers tended to roll their eyes while being assigned walking duty while their younger siblings trick-or-treated. But when the 80s horror-movie glut kicked in, it became much more of an adolescent-to-adult thing, especially for people who were adolescents then (such as myself). So, yeah, now it gets celebrated the way so many other holidays do–a bunch of adults getting drunk and acting silly. Meanwhile, the “kids’ stuff”–trick-or-treating, haunted houses that aren’t $20 a ticket or more, rec-center parties where kids bob for apples and go on a hay ride–yeah, that stuff’s been disappearing slowly but steadily.