Halloween in Brief

 This will be a brief blog post, since I'm still writing report cards. (Yes, I'm a TL and I write report cards. I'm also an ESL teacher and I have a lot to write. I won't go on about the new system, or how it keeps defaulting to Term 2 instead of the Progress Report, or how I printed the Primary ESL Continua for consultation with class teachers when I needed to print the Junior ESL Continua.)

The last time I wrote about Halloween on my blog was in 2022. Every year, I keep certain Halloween statistics ever since hubby and I traded places in 2012. (He used to say that taking the children out trick-or-treating was the "easy job". He jinxed himself because after that, until the kids stopped going out for candy, the weather was mostly miserable.) I track the time the first trick-or-treater appears, the number of visitors, and the time the last trick-or-treater appears.

This year was significant because a) the weather was lovely, and b) Halloween was on a Saturday. Our visit tally rose.

2022 = 42

2023 = 37

2024 = 39

2025 = 35

2026 = 57

Now that I have adult children, we all hang around to do the distribution duty. I didn't hang around much, because, well, report cards. 

We found a pumpkin and hubby carved Dimple from Mob Psycho 100 as our jack-o-lantern.

I continued my annual tradition of wearing two costumes at school - one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I was a flamingo rider in the morning and a baby after lunch. At home, I was a judge. (At the gym, I reused my baby costume.)

I debated about whether I should do a lot of Halloween activities, like pumpkin carving or apple bobbing. Last year, my ESL co-teacher organized quite a few tasks. In the end, the only thing I replicated from last year was the hunt by my ESL students for a hidden turtle to earn their treat bag. I was actually quite ill from Tuesday evening until Thursday evening, so I was not at school or even up to arranging any sort of extra tasks. It was a lucky thing I was well enough to make it to school. Our school had a small parade to showcase costumes, and between organizing that and trying to find time for the students to read their clues and find the big turtle (which was part of my preposition focus for reading), that was most of the day. 

Is it worth making all this effort, and spending personal money? I don't want to over-emphasize certain holidays, but children really do seem to enjoy the fun.

Plus, there were other things that we did, that if my brain were working at full capacity, I would have probably written more at length about that aren't tied to holidays, like the research that our FLL Robotics Team is doing and the field trip we took to a former landfill that's been transformed into an urban park.  

Or the Ottawa Public Library talk I gave, all the while pretending I was fine, on Navigating Online Content for Older Adults, which seemed to go well. 

Oh well - back to report cards!