Facing Fears at Halloween

Halloween is a special holiday with ancient roots. The ancient Celtic people believed that this was the time of year when the spirits of the dead were closest to the spirits of the living. It is a time to honor ancestors and to celebrate the end of the harvest. It’s a time for honoring the darkening days and for enjoying things that are spooky and scary. On Halloween, we make a game out of being afraid, and maybe that helps us to deal with our fears during the rest of the year.

Sometimes something can seem scary or not scary depending on how we think about it.  Children at the 11:00 class made Halloween masks that show the two sides of something scary. Each child picked something that might be scary—like a spider or a tiger or the dark or a zombie. On one paper plate, we drew that thing as a really scary, vicious thing. On another paper plate, we draw that thing thinking of it as not scary at all, just a part of the natural world, or a fun made-up thing. 

These two-sided masks can remind us that the face that people are seeing on the outside is different than the one you are seeing on the inside. Maybe some of the things we assume are scary and dangerous don’t really have to be that scary at all—and maybe we need to be careful about our assumptions about people and things we don’t really know.