halloween in china

My Halloween in China wasn’t exactly the same as my Halloween’s in the US have been. Cami, Rachel, and I have come up with some pretty good costumes the past few years but being here in China limited our costume ideas this year. We gathered some materials and thought of many ideas and at last minute we put a few together. 


The day before Halloween we dressed up for our ELE classes and had Halloween parties in them. I was a cat. We had these cute little masks down in the classroom that we all used. My ELE students thought it was hilarious. I taught them all about the holiday Halloween and they were so interested. After I taught them many English words about the holiday like costume, trick or treat, bat, cat, mummy, pumpkin…they had many questions. Mary was in class that day and she translated there questions. I wasn’t quite sure how to answer some of the questions. They asked me things like why do they wrap the mummy’s up so tight and things like that. They weren’t really things about the holiday but they were things about the scary Halloween things I taught them. We had a fun time. 

The next day, which was Saturday, we had to teach ILP. We had missed teaching for a few days and so we had to make them up by teaching on Saturday’s. We decided to throw a Halloween party for them. Cami, Rach, and I decided to dress up as something that the kids would know. All they really knew about Halloween was that it was scary. So we dressed up as ghosts. We used our extra Mayflora International School sheets and tied them around our arms and legs. Then we ratted our hair and made our faces look dead and scary. We had not really thought that we actually might scare the children. So before class the other girls told us that we should hide and then pop out randomly and surprise the kids. We did that and scared a few of the children! We had some of them crying and most of them recovered. All but one did. Ashley, she was so scared all day she had to leave and go up to the classroom and watch a movie by herself. Mick was so scared that when Cami was trying to comfort him and tell him it was just her he punched her in the face. They were scared but after they realized it was just us most of them thought it was pretty cool. We had a little party where we decorated treat bags with them and did a little trick or treating. Then we went in to the movie room next door and watched Cinderella. There weren’t enough desks for all the children so they doubled them all up. The Chinese teachers had sat 2 kids to a seat. It was hilarious. So so cute! It looked like they were all on little dates. 

That night we threw an adult Halloween party where we invited many of our Chinese friends. It was a blast. Cami, Rach, and I dressed up as Chinese people. We threw our costumes together in just a few minutes and now after looking back at pictures wonder what in the world we were thinking! It was fun anyways though. We had passed out invitations and told them all to dress up but only a few came dressed up. But don’t worry we had face paint and painted everyone’s faces that didn’t have a costume. One person came dressed up. They were one of the first to come. We didn’t know who it was at first. He had a bag over his head and had taped fly swatters and random other things to the outside. Then he had poked two holes for his eyes. Later on he pulled it off and we found out it was the head master! It was hilarious. We had so much fun at our party. We played donut on a string, slurped up jello, played the limbo, pin the hat on the witch, musical chairs, and had a Halloween dance party. We had a great turn out. The older students crashed the party and ate all the refreshments before we could even get to the table which was fine. I’m glad they enjoyed things. Around 9:30 the power shut off. It has been doing that the past few nights and it was such a bummer. We still continued our party though. All the students were sent to bed but some teachers stayed and played games and danced for a while. What a great Halloween in China