october 31 | The Tea Cerebrations

It is that time of the year again, and the period of Halloween, a night which has kept me happier than most of the other night. This is that celebration, which even if not at all popular in this part of the world and not even heard about among the people of our locality, had a lot in store for us. Halloween did turn into something special in 2010, but it remained so only for just another year, and 2011 ended the same.

It was after my visit to the United Kingdom in 2010 that this celebration got going. Thanks to my cousin in England, I was able to get a few Halloween special items as the night neared. But I had to cut short my visit and return to India as my grandfather had expired. Soon, I returned with what all scary or almost scary things I had brought from the place. After a few days passed and there were only a few days to Halloween, I wondered what was the use of the costumes.

Our notices before the first & the second Halloween.

We had a group for the youth at that time, and more than a month had passed after the last meeting – I was for some odd reason the secretary of the group and decided to hold a meeting, in which I asked the same about the possible celebrations. There was not really a response in the beginning, but later we felt that may be it could be possible, not without doubts, but still there is hope.

The major arguments against the celebration were that
I. Nobody is aware of such a celebration and doesn’t care at all.
II. People will get scared and might even complain.
III. Some people might misunderstand the evil masks.
IV. We don’t conduct celebrations, only the elder’s group do.
V. We have absolutely no decision making power.

Hellboy, Mr. Brain, Ghostface & Wolfman 😀

But then we decided to give it a twist. I had read about the Halloween related fund raising programs for UNICEF which had raised a huge amount of money. It is really a nice idea, I have to say; for Halloween isn’t usually considered in a positive light, and this changes a lot: http://www.unicefusa.org/mission/usa/trick-or-treat. See what they say about the same “began in 1950 as a way to help kids who need more than candy”. Notice the tagline: IT’S SCARY HOW MUCH GOOD YOU CAN DO!

We thought, may be we could do something good with our group along with celebrating Halloween all at the same time. It was from this idea that we come up with the plan to give a detailed proposal to the association and get the permission to conduct the same. We printed notices and distributed them in each and every home to make sure that they will be ready when we arrived. We rented a few more masks from the shops to make sure that all our members were included.

Before unleashing the monsters…

We mentioned in the notice that we would take donations as well as the old clothes. Even as there were two or three homes which didn’t open the door or didn’t contribute, and even though a number of people were not at home, we did collect around five thousand rupees for the night along with a lot of old clothes, which we could take to the nearby children’s home and the home for the aged. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t go on for more than two years, due to the lack of volunteers and the absence of interest.

It is fun, and a satisfying thing to do. Unfortunately, our club did cease to exist.