Halloween Through the Eyes of a Child

Anyone who has spent any significant amount of time around young children can tell you how heartwarming it is watching kids discover new and wonderful things. That sparkle in their eyes reflects the explosion of excitement in their little minds as they encounter completely alien yet incredible new things. Ever seen a kid, just recently able to walk around on his own, adventure out into the first snowfall of his life? Maybe it's just that lizard brain biological impulse to reproduce and have some little rugrats myself, but I can't help but feel pangs of jealousy whenever I witness something like that, thoroughly mixed together with the profound sense of joy and even hope I get from seeing other human beings encounter strange new things and immediately fall in love with them.

Though it was an intense whirlwind of activity that unfortunately meant I didn't get anywhere near as many pictures as I had hoped (and many of those I did take got blurred to oblivion as I tried to quickly snap a photo before shuffling off to my next assignment), the pure, concentrated happiness that was the Herald School Halloween Party was staggering.

Halloween is about as far from being a big deal in Korea as it's possible for a holiday to get. It's certainly not a national holiday and, though you can find a very small selection of costume ingredients and decor at larger stores, Halloween seems to be something that essentially only exists in private English academies. There's no trick-or-treating, no jack-o'-lanterns, no annual glut of usually crappy horror movie sequels, no costume parties for the young and intoxicated. Maybe things are different in more Westernized areas or those with a larger concentration of expats, but not so in humble Cheonan.

Years of accumulated decor come out of boxes squirreled away in the school's labyrinth of shabby corridors that weave behind and between the classrooms. Banners, streamers, animated sculptures, bats, spiders, punny tombstones that range from the ridiculous (M.T. Box) to the awkwardly vulgar (Ben Dover). There's an ancient bag of costumes for the teachers that's mostly a mishmash of unrelated Halloween staples, like vampire capes, axes, Scream masks, skeleton suits, wigs and feathered party masks, most of which saw better days a decade ago. I opted out of the cracked ghost mask I was supplied with and instead made myself a spider-infested beard out of stretchable spider webbing, found a suitable staff on the mountain path and donned my best wizard cloak (turned inside-out to hide the out-of-place League of Legends logos). One student identified me as Gandalf, another as Hagrid, but most thought I was meant to be either Santa or simply an old man.

My last minute wizard costume. My god, was that beard a sweaty, hot, terrible decision.

Whatever the success of my costume, as soon as festivities proper started, the atmosphere of distilled wonder and excitement (with a dash or two of terror and candy-craving gluttony, for good measure) was intense. I should mention that, though the students may have heard about Halloween from some source, the real draw for them is Market Day. Throughout the year, students are given special Herald School stickers for a job well done in class each day, with more stickers given to students who behave themselves and work hard. On Market Day, half of the school's classrooms are transformed into stores selling goodies ranging from toys to school supplies, stickers, wallets, umbrellas, bags, a whole slew of erasers, pens and pencilcases, even cups of soda and snacks like fried chicken, pizza, tteok bokki and pan-fried dumplings. Each row of stickers the student has amassed over the years becomes one dollar American (quarter-scale laminated copies of the real deal). Students are given a brief lesson in haggling in English ("Discount please!" "I'd like to return this.") and sent on their merry way. Good students have wads of cash with which they buy bulging bags full of goodies, while the naughty kids try to haggle over the price of an eraser with sour looks of regret and jealousy on their faces.

Chloe and David waiting for the rush of kids to the popular Toy Store. In twenty minutes these tables will be a barren wasteland of empty boxes.

But then, bellies full of grub and bags full of loot, the lights are turned out, the music comes on, and students are sent out to wander the school's halls in search of hiding teachers, each a node of candy goodness. I had kids who cackled with delight when they had found me, who stared in awe when I handed them tiny fistfuls of candy for apparently no reason, who stumbled over backward in terror when they noticed me peering out from around a corner.

It could be that I'd grown desensitized to the whole ordeal of Halloween. The past few years in Germantown, I'd do my typical fat guy hermit routine: head to Wal-Mart, buy big sacks of the most delicious candy I could get (far more than I would ever need), then on Halloween itself sit around watching scary movies by myself as I wait for trick-or-treaters who never come and resign myself to eating all of the candy, pretending as though I didn't know this would happen again. This year, I carved a woefully plain jack-o'-lantern out of a completely inadequate, gray Korean pumpkin, the most Charlie Brown's Christmas tree pumpkin you could hope to find, and people were entranced by it, students and Korean coworkers alike.

Veronica puts her art degree to work, painting a succession of gory scars, black cats and pumpkins on students' smiling faces. Note my artistic contribution to the decor sitting on the desk.

Those two days were completely exhausting, but I haven't had this much fun on Halloween in years. As much as I'm comforted by tradition and routine, part of me honestly hopes that Halloween never really catches on here. I think the rose tint on one's glasses would become so much richer if the Halloween experience were limited to a couple of years of c-grade decor, tiny bags of hard candies most American kids would write off as pointless filler getting in the way of their full-sized Kit Kats, and teachers dressed in a motley mish-mash of decrepit costumery. I had some absolutely perfect Halloweens as a kid, but the slow descent to the pathetic dearth of Halloween spirit I've encountered each year since those glory days had me pretty salty about the whole affair.

I suppose it's dangerous to start expecting Korea to continue to surprise me like this, but I certainly wouldn't be upset if it did.