This is Halloween

All Hallow's Eve has become a pretty big event in Vilnius with all sorts of parties around town, haunted houses and even an orientation run on the theme of Halloween Radioactivity that was staged a few years ago.  However, the one I remember most fondly was the Halloween party we had at Daina's flat my first year in Vilnius.

I had been in the country barely one month.  I had just gotten to know her children and was wanting to engage them in something fun, as they were still a little bit of scared of this new man in their lives.  They didn't speak much English, and I hardly a word of Lithuanian, but Daina would translate stories at bedtime that seemed to ease their worries.  As Halloween approached, I had been coming up with ghost stories, which they thoroughly enjoyed and Goda wanted badly to celebrate the evening.   

She took the lead, as she did with such events, dressing up her little brother and herself.  We were unable to find anything other than a tiny yellowish green pumpkin that year, as no one celebrated the occasion.  We settled on a decorative cabbage as our table centerpiece.  My mother had sent some decorations by mail, but most of what we did was handmade.  She had been drawing  little Halloween caricatures the whole week and leaving them for me around the house.  It was just the four of us, and we found a way to entertain ourselves all evening.  

Goda told all her school friends about it a few days later, so naturally they wanted to celebrate the next time around.  Each year, the event grew bigger and bigger, but parents were still reticent to join in.  The main reason is that All Saints Day is very important to Lithuanians, and they saw Halloween as an American intrusion.  One year Daina and I decided to engage the parents of Goda's and Adakras' school friends by showing them the true meaning of All Hallow's Eve, which historically was part of this cycle.  Still, they were dubious. 

My sister was visiting us that October and offered to make a big pot of pumpkin soup.  It was no longer so hard to find pumpkins, they were available in all the stores, but it was still nicer to pick one out at the farmers' markets and support the local growers.  However, we had to scour the store shelves for a big pot as we had nothing at home on the scale we imagined.  We didn't know how many persons to expect, but we had a lot of room in our new house so the more the merrier.  Votive candles lit the driveway with a big jack-o-lantern at the door step.

The children had their sets of friends, and split up in different parts of the house, but we all came together for the big show, where  the invited guests had to do a song or skit that fit within the theme of the evening.   We had spent the week making all sorts of decorations, including huge paper murals based largely on The Nightmare Before Christmas. Goda served as make-up artist for anyone who wasn't sufficiently into the spirit of the evening.  I kicked off the presentation by providing a brief telling of Samhain, describing its Celtic roots and how this was essentially a new year's eve party, as the old Celtic calendar was based on the growing seasons.  On this night, you got to exorcise all your demons before honoring the saints and souls in your lives the following two days, with the beginning of the new year.  

I don't recall the skits at all.  I suppose it was the Bloody Marys that turned the evening into a blur.  My journal wasn't much help, although I noted that we made new friends, guests of guests as news of this celebration spread through the city.  It seemed Halloween grew in popularity afterward, and I prided myself in having planted the seed.  All though, I soon learned you can't go too far with the evening.  Not everyone was so taken by the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I used as the theme the following year.  

Alas, the kids are all grown now and in different parts of the world.  We don't plan much for the evening, but know to get candy and put a jack-o-lantern by the gate, as there are a few local kids who ring the bell asking for treats.  The most important thing is to have a pumpkin pie, as that is what Daina enjoys most.