I'm not crazy about Halloween or Dia de los Muertos or whatever you want to call it. Something about it seems wrong to me. I would blame the pagan rituals, but many of our "Christian" traditions have similar roots, and I'm not willing to give up my Christmas Tree. I think it's the celebration of the dead that gets me. After all, God is a "God of the living, not the dead." I prefer to celebrate living things. But playing a little dress up never hurt anybody. Trick or Treating is one of the stranger traditions. I found this on one of my favorite blogs: "Halloween is kind of confusing. For 364 days of the year we tell [our kids] not to accept candy from strangers. Then on Halloween, we dress [them] up ... and encourage [them] to use [their] hand as some sort of crane device to pick up the maximum payload possible when strangers offer [them] buckets of treats to choose from."
I hadn't noticed how much we did not emphasise October 31st until last night when someone told Benton "Happy Halloween" and he said "What's that?"
We have been to three "dress up" events this fall, and each time, I have given Benton the opportunity to participate, and each time I have received the same answer. "I think I'd rather be plain old me." If only we were all so comfortable in our own skin!
Yesterday he decided he wanted to be a knight in shining armor. I was going to wait until we got to the harvest party before I took pictures, but we barely got into the backyard before he was ready to be himself. So here is my knight who would rather be a real boy.
Nathaniel doesn't get the luxury of making such decisions. I forced him into the Tigger suit handed down from Benton who I forced into the costume before he had the luxury of making such decisions. Baby Nat's got plenty of bounce alright.
Last night we went to a harvest carnival at a local church along with the Rowles boys and some new friends, Kyler and Madaline. It was so much fun. The older boys (including Layth) had a blast playing games and loading up with candy. The babies kept me and Meghan (Kyler and Madaline's mom) quite busy. It was a very fun evening. We even managed a shot of all six kids looking in the general direction of the camera. Nathaniel toughed it out as Tigger most of the evening, but I set him free just before we went home (and before the picture).
2 comments:
I'm all about how making holidays mean whatever the family wants to instill in their children. The kids dressed up as a Knight, Dragon, and Bee and before Jesse's football game visited friends houses to get candy. We tought them to say treat please.
Cute costumes! Andy (now 23) had a knight's costume just like that! Boy, does that bring back memories! We went back and forth with the halloween thing, but mostly we just went with it.
Post a Comment