One of my closest friends Alyssa Court and I would always try to celebrate random holidays and create traditions together when we were growing up. One of those random traditions was giving each other an orange on Earth Day and eventually wearing Earth Day shirts every year. Talking about random… Well, I always loved that concept of creating random and different traditions and even more now that I have a little family to do them with. This idea of Bless’Oween was birthed a few weeks ago when I was talking to a friend and ministry partner about her discouragement that her girls think Christianity is boring because she didn’t want them to celebrate Halloween. I was giving her ideas of things to do with them when I am like, wait I am going to do this too!!! On the way home I called my mom to see if she wanted in on my light bulb ideas I had goin’ on in my head. These things I knew I wanted to implement on Halloween night.
- Dress up with a custom that had to do with that week’s theme of Play school
- Incorporate verses about being salt and light to the world and our purpose as Christians
- Candy and Bible verse scavenger hunt, books, and crafts
- Bless others not ask for candy
- Visit family and friends and show up on their doorstep to bring them gifts
As I was rambling off my ideas to my mom she goes, why not call it Bless’Oween. I LOVED it and now we have our tradition of Bless’Oween. Every year our blessings to others and random visits will look differently since we will most likely be in different places, but the principles and activities we will do will remain a constant. Do you have any traditions for Halloween? What does your family do? I like hearing other people’s ideas!!! Here is a snapshot of our Bless’Oween.
Elmer the Elephant Tie In
Elmer the Elephant book was a perfect tie in to Bless’Oween and our week’s theme of Elephants. Pretty perfect I have to say since Emma’s lovey is Elfy and we were learning the letter E this week. If you are not familiar with the story of Elmer, he is a colorful elephant who is different then the rest of the grey herd elephants who wanted to be grey like everyone else. We were able to connect how we celebrate Bless’Oween because we want to be different then the world and create our own traditions. I tied this into our spiritual life as Christians how we might stand out from the rest of the world with our choices and that following Jesus we will look differently! Our lives MUST look differently.
These are the Bible verses we used in our candy scavenger hunt that tied right along with living in the world, but not being part of it.
We only really only had two days of play school, but made them very meaningful. I made a bit of recourses this week that I actually didn’t even get to do in too much depth. Here is my week of Elephant Play Plans and the materials I made. Hope you can use them somehow!
Mama's Bilingual Play-School 