Kristin's Kapers : Halloween Chinese style

A few of our students trick-or-treating. Some
of them really dressed up, but I didn't think
to take pictures.

The entrance to the school. Notice that the pumpkins are
quite large, are the traditional jack-o-lantern
shape and are orange (or at least mostly). None of
these are common things in China.

I'm sure it surprises no one to hear that Halloween is not a traditional Chinese holiday. Back when I lived in Inner Mongolia (2002-2005) basically no one in China had ever heard of Halloween. My first year in Baotou (the city I lived in in Inner Mongolia) I taught a really cool class that included afternoon culture activities. That year we had a big Halloween party where we not only carved jack-o-lanterns, but made our own piñata (I didn't have anywhere to hang it from though so I stood on a chair and held it while my blindfolded students swung at it with a plastic bat). One funny thing I remember is I instructed my students to all bring in a pumpkin, preferably orange (traditionally most pumpkins here are green) to carve jack-o-lanterns. That student came to class laughing because when he was shopping for pumpkins he was looking for the biggest one he could find (they are traditionally quite small) and the seller told him, "but the smaller pumpkins taste better." He told us he replied, "but I'm not going to eat the pumpkin, I'm going to play with it!"

Fast forward to 2017 and its an entirely different story. Two weeks ago I was shopping

Some of us dressed up more than others.

in a large chain store (as opposed to an import store) and they had a whole section of Halloween decorations, costumes and more. At my current school the students all live on campus as do all over the foreign teachers, except me. The students asked some of the teachers if they could do trick-or-treating at the teacher's apartments. The teachers agreed and we all went and bought candy (I teamed up with someone else and we each gave candy out from her apartment). Then in the evening the student council threw a Halloween party. This Halloween party included a haunted house (where I managed to scare the kids trying to scare me instead of the other way around), lots of face painting, fake blood, costumes and or course candy. A couple of the biggest surprises for me were the fact spiderwebs and the large jack-o-lantern size pumpkins (they weren't carved though). It sure was a very different story from 15 years ago when my students only knew what I taught them about Halloween. Enjoy a sampling of the photos from Halloween.