This week’s rehearsal for the Village Children’s Choir just happened to land on Halloween.
I wasn’t quite sure what to do, as it is not as celebrated a custom here as where I grew up. All my years of teaching music in America, we music teachers were known to go over the top of the Halloween Theme Park, pulling out all kinds of spooky-fun sound effects and songs for the students to sing and move to, decorating our music rooms with black lights and cobwebs, and having cauldrons of sweets to lavish upon the students as they crossed through the portals of serious education into whatever atmospheric splendour of camp mystery we would create. From the moment the kids walked through the school doors, their senses would go on overload with all the Halloween sights, sounds, and smells of sweets or popcorn. Many of the primary-aged students bring their fancy Halloween dress to school for the parties their classes will have at the end of the school day.
One year from my piano studio at home I greeted all my private piano students coming for their lessons with the strains of Lizst’s Totentanz and Schubert’s Erlkönig, dressed as a Scottish Widow (but way uglier), serving cauldrons of cider spiked with dry ice, and baskets of home-made sweets. The neighbours came to party later. (OH! In America the cider served to kids isn’t full of alcohol…)
The Village Children’s Choir meets in the village’s primary school hall, so when I walked into the school this Wednesday with my meagre Halloween bounty (by American standards), I must admit it felt a little strange NOT to see ANY Halloween decorations. Doubts were beginning to fill my mind with the immediate thought being, ‘Not a good idea. Revert to Plan C’.
But my choir colleague and cohort-in-fun thought we should have some excitement, sooooo…
When the 33 little choir members came into rehearsal in their crisp school uniforms, we decided they needed to loosen up! We wore wacky hands for conducting and accompanying. We used a large black gauzy scarf to convey lightness of singing tone, and tried to get the kids to loosen up and ‘float’ – the British stiff upper lip almost won the day, but we prevailed! At rehearsal’s end, the kids were singing high G’s in the descant to O, come all ye faithful without screeching. As they politely chose candy out of the basket (in an orderly queue!) I was shocked when they each sincerely responded with ‘Thank you and Happy Halloween’.
In America, my students rarely thanked me, saved ‘Happy’ for birthday, and felt entitled to more than the one or two pieces of sweets I could afford to ladle out. Nor did they appreciate how I and other teachers came close to breaking our bank accounts so they could have a fun campy experience. (I had to have enough treats for close to 800 elementary students, as they all came to me for music.) One year I was so broke I decided I just could not afford the treats. As music teachers did not have ‘room mothers’ as classroom teachers did, and I had so many students I would have been baking cookies for weeks, I tried to get by with cutesy paper cut-outs and singing games. But the kids were already wired and crawling the ceiling from their PE classes prior to music, expecting more sweets, as the PE teacher had apparently only robbed her bank and not another. I wasn’t the most popular teacher on campus that year, and the principal’s smiles were increasingly lack-lustre (he never needed Halloween to resemble the Grim Reaper).
The American Halloween custom of Trick-or-Treat has just been starting to catch on here in the UK in the last couple of years. In 2002, there was not much to choose from for fancy dress costumes in the grocery stores, no bags of sweets packaged in bulk, and therefore nothing fancy or with a Halloween theme for Trick-or-Treaters to carry their loot about.
But now this American custom is being adopted and accepted more each year. In the last couple of years Sainsbury’s, Tesco, ASDA have all bought into the culture and even dedicated an aisle for children’s fancy dress, masks, freaky accessories, AND some sweets packaged in bulk.
Well, sort of … Brits don’t do bulk as comfortably or readily as Americans.
“Brits don’t do bulk as comfortably or readily as Americans.”
Boy, that’s the truth. My Sam’s Club/Costco shopping mentality got quite the shock when we moved to the UK. Surprisingly there is a Costco but it’s membership rules are just like they used to be years ago here in the US – you have to be a teacher or a police officer or some such to join. Just as well, I’m not sure how I would’ve fit bulk of anything perishable in my small fridge anyway.
It often made me unhappy to see American cultural things slipping into UK culture. Does that bother you at all?
bibliophilist: Great to hear from you.
YES! I must admit I have some guilt when my British friends and family get dismayed and upset with American stores and customs being imposed on their economy and way of life, much like Americans do when they see a foreign culture become more important or equal to their own.
Until I moved outside of the US as an adult and have lived amongst NO Americans (I only have one friend from America I get to converse with regularly, and she has lived here much longer than me) I never realised how much what Americans do affects how others in the world live. Although there are some positives, sadly I have observed most of the affects fall into the negative category. America’s secular and inexpensive life-style comes at great cost to others. Americans perhaps learn this when they travel abroad and feel the devaluation of the US dollar on the global market hit their budgets for business and tourism in their pocket book.
Some things are just meant to be contained within the context of one’s own borders and boundary’s. It’s okay if they are let out once in awhile, but they must not overstay their welcome.
Deb, I just found your new site. I love it and love reading about your life in England. My daughter is coming to ACU’s Study Abroad program in Oxford in January. She is so excited. I wish that I could afford to come visit her while she is there. I will have to work on that in the next couple of months. I’m afraid that she will love it so much that she will never come home. I know that I would feel very at home there.