Shanghai Surprises: Halloween- Chinese style.

Halloween is a purely American holiday as far as I can tell. Nobody else celebrates it the way we do. I had resigned myself to skipping the festivities this year, figuring the kids were too young to know the difference anyway. But one day I noticed a flyer had been posted by our apartment management that there would be a Halloween celebration on Tuesday, October 30th. Why not actually on Halloween day you may ask? I don't know but you take what you can get around here.

First, I had to sign up to hand out candy since most Chinese don't get it and don't want a bunch of kids ringing their doorbell. I was given a sticker to put on our mailbox to indicate that we were participating. So far, so good. I bought my candy (the good stuff- bite sized snickers) and Sev manned the door while I took the kids to the festival. It started out with a great puppet show which was really good but over an hour long. Imagine telling a bunch of kids that they get to go around collecting candy but not until after the HOUR long puppet show. The plan was to break the kids up into groups of 10 so that they could be accompanied around by someone from the apartment management (since our key cards only work at our own buildings there is no way to get into the other towers). But in typical Chinese fashion, they didn't split up the kids prior to the event and everyone wanted to be in the first group so it basically ended up being a totally unorganized roving gang of hundreds of kids. Imagine trying to cram all these kids and parents on the elevators to get them up to the participating apartments- not good. Not to mention that nobody had any idea how many kids to expect and so most people ran out of candy shortly after the event started.

Since this was the first time many Chinese parents and kids had done Halloween, they didn't really get the full concept. For example, many of the kids came without a bag to put their candy in. And they didn't know how to say "trick or treat" so they would just ring the bell and stick out their hand. It was pretty funny. It was also the first time many of the Chinese residents had handed out candy. Remember when you would go trick or treating and the old people would give out the gross stuff that was always the last thing left at the bottom of your bag after you ate all the good stuff? Well, that was pretty much what everyone was giving out here (i.e. coffee flavored hard candy). Thank goodness Grace was satisfied just hitting 3 apartments and Audrey had signed out half way through the puppet show.

Perhaps next year (if we are still here) I will volunteer to organize the event and give them a taste of what an American Halloween should really look like- but then again, maybe I'll just sit back and let the events unfold in typical Chinese fashion- it certainly makes for a more entertaining experience!