Candy apples are not easy to eat w/o front teeth.
She's cold, but won't wear a sweaterEmily liked "everything" about her Halloween party.
Tara liked "everything" too.
It's so good that they are specific. :)
Tara lost yet another tooth. It's hard to believe she has any left to lose. She took it to school and lost it. She was crying that the Tooth Fairy wouldn't come. But the Tooth Fairy did and left a note. Both girls looked suspiciously at me and asked me if I were the Tooth Fairy, noting that the handwriting looked a lot like mine. Imagine! Why would they ever think such a thing?! I do believe the jig is up.
4 comments:
Wow – your girls are dong handwriting analysis?
Get them on the fast track to CSI school now!
Seriously though, that is impressive observational skills.
I love Halloween. The Christian fundamentalists in my family had me wondering if I were going to hell for enjoying it. And it did evolve out of old pagan customs, but then so did Christmas and Easter. So I decided I’d just be aware about how I was celebrating and then have some plain old fashioned childlike fun!!!
CSI school is hilarious. I also struggle with how much to celebrate Halloween. When Emily was really little, we didn't celebrate it at all. Now I feel like that would be a hardship for them to make what kind of point? It was a proceess getting there though.
It’s a complicated thing.
Christmas trees, ivy, holly, the Yule log, Easter eggs, rabbits, halos, rainbows, angels, demons, a god who dies and is brought back to life - all were pagan symbols before being given a Judeo-Christian meaning; and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
There never has been a “pure” Christian anything. Judaism and Christianity grew up immersed in the cultures they were a part of. What was unique was the new interpretations they gave to old symbols. They could look at a particular symbol possibly see some truth in it and then give it a new spin revealing a greater truth - which to me is an act of revelation. God speaks into the context in which we live giving it a deeper, more profound meaning.
I think Halloween gets most of the fundamentalist bad-press because it’s overtly tied to witches & magic. Christmas and Easter are also tied to major pagan festivals, but it’s so subtle that it’s easy for us to not think about those who gather to celebrate differently.
Also, Halloween can expose our darkside, our shadow and that scares people – as it should. But like everything else in life, facing our shadow can be good or bad depending on how we do it. We can enter into a life giving dialogue with our shadow, or we can allow it to posses us or we can repress it until it goes underground only to posses us later on in another form – like so much of the anger and hate we hear coming from the fundamentalists – where their shadow has taken control and “in the name of Jesus” is ready to crucify somebody – anybody – they just need an enemy.
I’m going on way to long here so I’ll try to cut this short.
Halloween can be a kind of play-therapy where adults and kids can exercise their creativity and imagination, explore other possibilities like being a superhero or a pharaoh, and if appropriate play through their fears and anxieties by letting them become monsters and then taking the monsters power away in a variety of ways.
Repression and denial are what I fear the most. Probably because they have played such unpleasant roles in my life and family history – although I see the same patterns playing out in politics and international relations – and that, far more than a silly dress-up holiday, is what really scares me.
Mr. Rat that was a most excellent brief history of time!!
I like to think we've all found a healthy balance with this Halloween thing.
It won't stop the kids from asking to be witches every year though, haha.
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