Hawaiian Halloween

Halloween can be a sticky topic among Christians. I usually keep very quiet about my stance on Halloween celebrations. I've found it can lead to an all out attack by those who are convinced they are right and that they need to tell me the truth.

So here it is:

I take my kids trick or treating. I do. I always have. Every year of their lives. And not once did we stop and worship satan along the way.


(Please do not email me to tell me the history of Halloween or the true meaning of All Hallows Eve. I've heard it all. We still trick or treat.)

Anyway, I was actually surprised (and a little disappointed) this year when my kids said they wanted to attend the trunk or treat at our church instead of trick or treating in our neighborhood.


We have a lot of homeschoolers at our church and many of them do the same history program. Currently they are all studying the Amazon. So they decided to have a themed alternative party at the church on Halloween with a South American theme. We aren't used to working with a theme, and it actually made it much more difficult to come up with costume ideas. Plus with Kerry gone, my mind is overloaded with all I have to do each day and I just didn't have the brain power or energy to work on this a lot.

Katie went as a flower.

Emily went as a monkey.



Ben went as an explorer with two snakes wrapped around him. (I made him rearrange the snakes so that neither of them was coming out the leg of his shorts after this picture.)

I didn't know what to expect. I've always heard of "trunk or treat" so I thought there would be cars parked in the parking lot and the kids would go to each car for candy. Didn't sound like much fun. Didn't seem like it could take very long. The parking lot isn't that big.

It turned out, the students had really been working hard on decorations and games. They had painted jungle scenes for their class and those were used as backdrops for the games. In this game, kids had to toss Amazon beanie babies into the bowls to win candy.

There was a giant Easter Island type statue which was used as a hula-hoop tossing game.



Kids had to throw two green snakes (green tube socks filled with a tennis ball and stuffing) at this pyramid and knock it down.

The games were fun, but one of my favorite things about the evening was the food! Everything had signs on it describing it as some exotic Amazonian cuisine. The drink of the evening was Swamp Juice which smoked and bubbled with dry ice in it.

This is what it looked like when the dry ice had sublimated. It had fresh spinach, raisins, and gummy worms in it. I thought I saw a wash cloth in there at one point too. I declined to try it.

"Brazilian Dogs - Contains Galapagos lizard livers and crocodile meat."

"Hot Amazon Watercress - made from the non-poisonous parts of the deadly man-eating Amazon Watercress Plant (All poisonous parts of the deadly, man-eating Amazon watercress plant were carefully removed by authentic tribesmen of the Notsosmartse tribe who eat the deadly plant as part of their daily diet. There are only 3 tribesmen left in existence today.) Enjoy!!!!"

"South American Tribal Buns - Special thanks to the Bigbunzy tribe of Peru for making and providing these buns."

"Bananas (duh) - from Costco."

There wasn't a costume contest, but if there had been, this little girl would have gotten my vote. I laughed every time I looked at her!

There were plenty of great activities, but one of my favorites was a maze made of refrigerator boxes.

You wouldn't think it would be difficult to find your way through, but it really was. They had cut hidden doors in some of the boxes and you had to locate those spots in order to make it back out.

Various teens would yell to me, "Just follow my voice!"

"I can't!" I yelled back, "I'm at a dead end and there's no way over there!" I eventually found my way out after running into a few plane crash victims and a snake-covered explorer who gave me some hints.

The students had set up an area with displays of the studies they had done about South America as well. One adult exclaimed, "Wow! These look like something you'd see in a real school!" The teens thought that was hilarious.

There was a piranha-infested pit of shredded paper in which brave children could dive for candy. It took forever to clean those giblets of paper out of the girls hair!

There was also a "snake stomp" where long balloons were tied to the kids ankles, and each person tried to pop everyone else's snake before theirs was stomped out of existence.

I'm not sure who came up with the idea of giving every kid a pea shooter and all the Kix cereal they could blow thorough it. There were all out wars breaking out left and right with people shooting Kix through their straws at each other. Some folks were laughing so hard I was afraid they were going to inhale their cereal instead of blowing it back out.

Turns out trunk or treat is a lot more fun than I thought!