Our Halloween Traditions

Over the weekend my nephew and I were able to work on our Halloween traditions.  First up was carving our pumpkin.  This year he wanted to create a jack-o-lantern that played tribute to his new obsession, his favorite computer game, Fornite.  Since he’s getting older I thought that our usual tradition of reading the toddler book “The Pumpkin Gospel” before our carving process was no longer age appropriate because he’s almost a teen now.  I never expected him to miss this part of our carving process, but as we began to outline the design on his pumpkin he said, “Tia, aren’t you forgetting something, what about the story we usually read before we carve?”  I almost fell to the floor in shock because in the years past he’s complained about the book, but now I realize that he’s one of those kids that complains about things even though in reality he really enjoys these small faith traditions.  I asked him to summarize the book and he totally remembered the story, but now it had a new depth because he’s older and understands spiritual truths a little better.  After his retelling I went and I grabbed the picture book from my book shelve and we read it just like we have done so since our first year carving pumpkins.

Then we worked on branding our candy with stickers to evangelize the masses on Halloween night.  This year instead of our usual “Jesus loves you” stickers we found stickers with images of Jesus and Mary to place on all of our candy wrappers because sometimes an image can be equally inspiring as words.  Again, while we were blessing our candy with a good Catholic message my nephew was like, “Tia, you know we are the only house that does this.”  Which followed with a great discussion on how being different is totally cool.  “We want to share our love for Jesus with others,” I told him “can you imagine getting a candy with the image of Jesus or Mary - it can help families have discussions about who the people in these images are. Besides Halloween is a day to not be normal…”

Then we attended our annual Parish Fall Fest as Saint Barbara and Saint Maximilian Kolbe.  The parish fest is a celebration for the children in our parish, they are invited to dress as saints, there’s a pizza dinner, games and a scary reptile critters show.  This year both my nephew and I volunteered and we had such a great time!  He was the only middle schooler dressed in costume (apparently at his age it’s no longer cool to dress up) but again I passed my love for costumes with him and in the end he enjoyed dressing up. Thus, our Halloween weekend came to a close.     

 Saint selfies!