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Hallowe’en at the Little Schoolhouse

Hallowe'enMy sisters, June and April, are walking with me to school. We love school, so every day is exciting. But today is more exciting than ever. Every day, when we get to school, there is a new date on the chalkboard, up high up at the very top. Yesterday, Mrs. Brick printed it in coloured chalk! She wrote out October 29, 1947. It was in orange and yellow and purple. Us kids never saw coloured chalk before, so the whole school was watching her do this, (except for Eddie and Johnny, who were playing marbles under their desks).

When we get into the school, we do all of the things we are supposed to do, hanging up our jackets and putting our lunches on the shelf. Then we come into the room and sit very still at our desks, with our hands together, on the top of our desks. But two of the boys at the back don’t do that right away, so we all turn around and give them mean looks. Betty even hisses at them.

Then Mrs. Brick turns around and starts to tell us about what is going to happen today, on Halloween! We already know it’s going to be something important, because yesterday she decorated the room with orange and black streamers and the spooky pictures we made this week.

“We are going to start our party at one o’clock, right after lunch,”she is saying.
“Mrs. Burmey has sent us a Hallowe’en cake, and Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Daigle made some cookies and popcorn balls. You all have to go outside at recess and noon hour after you eat your lunch, so we can get ready for the party. Except for June and Doris, who are going to help me. And Billy, who has to draw some more pictures on the board.”

Billy was my cousin, who I hated, because he bullied us girls, but he could draw things that looked real, so I guess I was happy about that. I was proud that Teacher chose my sister to help, and I could hardly wait until I was older, like her.

Let the Party begin!

After lunch Doris stood on the step and rang the bell, and we came in so quietly, you could hear a pin drop, like Mumma sometimes says. While we were outside, Mrs. Brick put some black crepe paper up on the windows, so the room looked darker and a little bit spooky. The desks were all dragged over to the side, and there was bare floor in the middle.
“We’re going to play games,” April whispered to me, and I told her yes, that’s probably what we will do.

On the front blackboard, Billy had drawn a huge black witch flying across an orange moon. And on the Teacher’s desk, there was a pumpkin, with the insides all scraped out, and a face cut out on the sides. I knew what it was—a jack-o-lantern, because I saw a picture of one in our readers.

June took me and April into the cloakroom, so that we could put on our costumes. Every night for a long time, Mumma had been sewing them, out of crepe paper that she got from the catalogue. I loved to pinch a bit of the paper and stretch it. It seemed like magic to me, the way the stretched paper stayed that way, and I could make it look wavy. Mumma didn’t like that and said I wrecked a precious piece of it! I was very sorry, and cried, because I didn’t like to ever make Mumma unhappy!

The other kids just stared at us

The costumes were beautiful. June was Little Bo Peep, in a blue and white dress with a puffy skirt. She had a stick that had a bend in it, on the end. Mumma said that Little Bo Peep was a Shepard, and the stick was a staff, for rounding up the sheep. April was an elf, all in red and green colours, with a pointed hat and a blouse and pants which were pinched in at the ankles. She smiled her impish smile, and looked like a real elf, just like the picture we saw in the encyclopedia at home.

Mine was the hardest costume to make, Mumma said. I was a pumpkin, and the orange crepe paper covered all of me, except for my head, where I had a green hat stuck in with bobby pins. June had a hard time getting it to stay on my head.

When we came out of the cloakroom, the other kids just stared at us. They had never seen anything so beautiful! No one else had costumes like that. One or two kids were ghosts with sheets on them, and Billy was a tramp, carrying a red handkerchief on a pole.

When we played ‘Skip to My Lou’, our costumes rustled so loud, some of the kids stopped just to hear the sound!

Skip, skip, skip to my Lou,
Skip, skip, skip to my Lou,

Fly in the buttermilk, Shoo, shoo, shoo!
Skip to my Lou, my darling!
Lou, Lou skip to my Lou!
Skip to my Lou, my darling.

Then we played ‘Pin the Tail on the Donkey’, and ‘Red Light, Red Light’. But when we played ‘Run Sheep Run’, April’s hat flew off and got stepped on, and my pumpkin skirt tore a little bit on the side. June put her staff on a desk, and someone must have played with it because the hoop part came off.

Then we had the cakes and cookies. We had the popcorn ball last, and I saved mine for Allan at home, all wrapped in wax paper.

When Teacher rang the last bell, she told us to get all of our stuff and leave really quickly, so that she could clean up the mess before dark, so we put our coats on over our costumes and started down the road. We were very tired from having so much fun, and we didn’t care so much about our costumes now. They were all a little bit torn and April’s was almost wrecked.

Mumma was standing outside the gate when we got home, waiting for us. Allan was there too, holding on to her hand.

“It looks like you had fun,” Mumma said.
“We wrecked our costumes!” we all wailed.

Mumma only smiled, and helped us take them off. Carefully, she folded them and put them away in the cupboard.

I am tired now, and very happy. I know that we will take the costumes out of the cupboard soon, and fix them up with pins and tape. They are still good. We would probably play “Hallowe’en Party” from now until Christmas!

‘Skip My Lou’ video courtesy of “musicfactorymusic”

19 thoughts on “Hallowe’en at the Little Schoolhouse”

  1. Having participated in such parties as a child and managed them as a teacher, I cherished every word of this post. You brought the unbounded joy of Halloween parties back to me and made me smile. Thank you.

    1. Still the Lucky Few

      Much later in my life, when I was a teacher as well, I always tried to make Hallowe’en a special event for the children.

  2. A wonderful, evocative description of this special day. It’s fun for me to see it through your eyes as a child. I have only sketchy memories of my early school times, and your mention of the stretchy crepe paper brought some of them back! Thanks for this episode!

    1. Still the Lucky Few

      They say that everything that ever happened in your life is still there, just waiting to be uncovered. The deeper I go into some of these memories, the easier it is to access the details. They just sort of come back!

    1. Still the Lucky Few

      Happiness came from small, insignificant things—having so little in worldly possessions illuminated the importance of every new thing!

  3. For a little while I was back in the classroom, hearing the desks scrape across the wood floor, feeling the excitement that i used to feel when someone with authority did something nice, something that would wrap the experience in the sweet sense of inclusion. Things are different now, but I don’t know that my Grandchildren don’t feel the same feelings, that their memories won’t be just as sweet.

    1. Still the Lucky Few

      Part of it is just the wonder of childhood. Your Grandchildren will surely value different experiences, and they will be wonderful to them!

    1. It depends on where you went to school. Country schools were the center of social activity, so concerts and celebrations were tremendously important.

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