Cohousing-L Mailing List: What we do on Halloween

[Sharon Villines (sharon]

This is what we do on Halloween:

http://www.takomavillage.org

On the left you see the edge of a fire and some years we have had witches 
stirring a cauldron. Our Chief Witch was away at a Jane Austin convention this 
year. 

This year we also handed out 2 ½ boxes of books that our children had outgrown. 
It was very nice. You need someone there who knows which books will interest a 
particular age group. It's hard for them to plow through a box of mixed titles 
and find something. Parents were often clueless.

Children have been told a hundred times not to take things so they were afraid 
to take them. The parents were reluctant to take more than one and we had more 
books than treaters so we needed some of them to take more than one.

Highlights

1. Gratitude from a parent who apparently really needed books

2. Enthusiasm from a teenaged parent who had not a clue about reading to a 9 
month old baby.

3. Excitement from a spider about finding out that more than one Bernstein Bear 
book existed — he got 5 paperbacks and quickly stuffed them (with some effort) 
into his pumpkin candy collector so no one else would see them.

4. Wide eyes of excitement over a Dora book with flaps you lift up to finish a 
sentence.

While a number of treaters were not interested in books, carrying them around 
or standing still long enough to find one, only one family of children said 
they didn't like books. Since we had a good number who seemed to need more 
books and welcomed information about what to read, I don't think it is true 
that our neighborhood is book saturated.

Sharon
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Sharon Villines
"We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities." Walt Kelly