Joyeux Halloween!

I just have to write tonight after a lovely and bizarre evening. As most of you know, I love Halloween, Sidney loves Halloween and Mac loves Halloween too. It was the main thing that Sidney was upset about when we were leaving Canada - that he would miss Halloween and that they don't do Halloween in France. Not so, apparently. About ten years ago the powers that be, and by that I mean the various holiday promoting industries, started pushing Halloween here. And it worked. The kids wanted to dress up and run around collecting sweets. No kidding. its one of the best holidays going!
So apparently in this village three years ago, they started a new tradition. But its a bit different than 'back home!'
And it requires a bit of planning. The village had had posters everywhere for the past few weeks announcing the event. But the event ran as such:

29th of October - Halloween market - where you buy the candy to give out.
31st of October - 4:30 pm Children in disguises meet at Salle De L'avenir
31st of October - 5:00 pm Children go through the streets knocking on doors and collecting bonbons
31st of October 6:30 pm Children return to Salle De L'avenir to share their candies.

To ensure that everyone got the message - get the candy, be ready to give it out. They announced it from the loudspeaker this morning from the clock tower. "Be ready, its Halloween! the children are coming to collect candies"

We were totally ready. Overprepared one might say. We had decorated the tower with tissue paper pumpkins and had carved a pumpkin and disguised it as a dragon. Sidney was dressed as Darth Maul from Star Wars, minus the face paint which he baulked at at the last minute. We even found out where 'salle de l'avenir' was! (from the bartender)

The children were ready - frankly Sidneys costume was definitely in the running for the best costume and he was psyched. He had a black cape, a red electronic light saber and a hat/head that was covered with horns. For a while until he took that off.  A neighbour asked me to chaperone his samurai son around as he had to give out candy and so we had a companion. Then each child was assigned a group, with a specified route through the city - intended to hit all houses - despite the fact that many houses are shut up for winter. We were in the group rose.

And so we headed out, ourselves and about 8 kids. Because there is no tradition of 'shellout shellout the witches are out!" or even 'trick or treat!' the kids tended to converge on doors and hammer on them like a mob out for justice... then they would wait a couple of seconds and run onwards to the next door. The slower moving habitants would have to call the children back to give them candy. But because this is all new, and perhaps because they knew of the sharing ritual afterwards, they would often simply put a whole bag of candy in one kids basket, leaving the rest with naught. And given that the village shop only sells one kind of sweets, there was an oversupply of those candies with the soft fruit centres.. you know the ones. I kind of like them, but Sidney doesn't. A fact that became very apparent as time progressed and he started to refuse to go to doors. The other local child I was escorting also stuck close, trying to find sweets in his bag that Sid would like. Also picking me flowers. Ah, le francais!

Anyway, eventually we returned to the salle d'avenir. The candy was all put onto the table and the teachers (I think) divided it up. Then the zombies arrived. There were three zombie adults and two kids. Their makeup was amazing and they scared some of the smaller children, inadvertantly. I kind of suspected they were the people we've been trying to make friends with in the village, but honestly I couldn't recognize them.
After getting our share of the loot, we headed home and a few minutes later, the zombies came by and invited us out for a cup of coffee.  Indeed, they were the people we wanted to befriend - being the local anarchists and artists. Sidney was timid and didn't want to go and I lucked out - Mac stayed home with Sid. I went to their house and the very first thing, we decorated the place for Halloween, drank wine, chatted in english and french and got to know some of the local characters and their kids. So lovely! They even had a pumpkin! a la prochaine.