Market Day & Pumpkin Carving in China

My favorite time as a teacher overseas was the time around the holidays. Regardless of what your opinions are on Halloween, I think it's safe to say that any time there is candy, dressing up & carving pumpkins involved, it's fun & kids like it! It was even more fun for me to live Halloween through the eyes of my kids. For most of them, the parties we held in their classes were the first Halloween parties they'd ever attended. The pumpkins we carved were the first they'd ever carved. There's something special about being apart of that. Part of our tradition with our after school kids was to hold a Market Day & Halloween party around Halloween time. We taught in our home several days a week after school. These kids became like our own.
We gathered pumpkins for these parties for weeks. Among all of our classes & all of our kids, we needed about 20 for everyone to have one. We even drove way out into the villages, looking for pumpkins, to which we found none. Finally, we found a market just down the street from us, that sold the little pumpkin pie pumpkins, so we made a deal with a guy to carry to our house a crate of 20. I won't say how much money we spent on them but let's just say that we've realized that the $3 pumpkin bins of huge pumpkins sitting outside our grocery store here in Texas is a God send. It's funny how your normal changes, right? Our normal was lugging pumpkin pie pumpkins home for a gajillion yuan. We're still in awe over all the conveniences of America.


 Part of our Halloween Party day was to have a Market. As a reward system our students earned paper dollars over the semester & were able to spend it at market day. We stocked the table with tons of goodies, like; candy, toys, note pads, pencil sharpeners, stickers, etc. Kids go crazy for fun school supplies, don't they? In China, they have the best school supplies. Everything is shaped like food or animals.
In addition to Market Day & pumpkin carving, the kids were supposed to dress up in a costume. They did pretty good with what's available in China. We also had some delicious pumpkin bread & fresh whipping cream together, both of which they'd never had. It was a pretty fun party, I think. Since we had several classes, we have several pictures & groups of students. I'm bummed we don't have pictures of all our classes but I'm still cherishing these. I miss our kiddos so much. But I have another little one in my life now, Sophie! And we've carved our pumpkin, too. :)
Teaching them all about carving pumpkins.
Voila! Pumpkins carved!

I thought they all turned out pretty good. The pumpkin carving kits here in the States are blowing my mind this year. Those little serrated knives are amazing. If we could go back, I'd have my mom send me a ton. As you know, when carving pumpkins with kids, the adults do most of the real carving. My hands were pretty raw in some places using a regular knife for 10+ pumpkins. I can hardly believe how easy it is when you have that little kit!
Do you have any fun Halloween traditions?

Pumpkin Carving

 

Our Halloween celebrations were endless this year! We had a High School Halloween dance to attend, Halloween parties in every class at school & lots of Halloween fun at home with our evening students. For Halloween, we had a 'market day' where our students used their 'money' they've earned in class the past few months, to buy some goodies!

The kids alos dressed in their Halloween best.

In China, there is usually a large bin at most grocery stores that will always & only have colorful masks, shiny capes & witch hats, as you can see above. Coco was, of course, the most popular of the party with her Elsa, Frozen costume!

 

Once everyone choose their pumpkins (we had 26 to choose from!) we started carving. Last year we carved some awesome pumpkins with our students but this year we had 21 students' pumpkins to carve among our evening classes, so we went with the plain and simple triangle faces. 

 

 

I accidentally cut this guys nose off, so I had to put him back together with a toothpick!

The kids had a great time & I'm not gonna lie, even though I cut 10+ pumpkins, it was still fun. Carving pumpkins will never get old, I think! I can't wait to have our own kids one day to carve them with!

Halloween in November

No, we didn't celebrate Halloween in November. We did, in fact, carve pumpkins before Halloween, 2 weeks before to be exact, which that in itself is quite an accomplishment for me. Let me just set the record straight, I'm not one of those "IT" bloggers that have it all together. I quite possibly will always be behind in blogging, I'll probably blog about Christmas in February, and still have my tree up when I do it. It's a fact that I've come to live with and am okay with at this point in my life. So, alas. If you thought all the Halloween posts were over in the blog world, ring a ding ding ding (The Office, anyone?), here's another one!! 

So, you wanna know the deets to caving pumpkins in China? Well, I'm your girl. 

Now, you're gonna need the tools. Now, it should be noted that living in China forces you to be creative around the holidays. There aren't bins of pumpkin carving patterns & tools, aisles of cake mix boxes, baskets of wrapping paper or any of that awesome holiday-sort. You have to go back to the bare necessities. Thankfully, the tools needed for Jack O Lanterns are all tools you can easily find in your Chinese home. 

*I know I've said it before but I'll say it again, if you need a Pinterest designer, I'm your girl. I mean, check out that awesome cut & paste job/non matching background. It's pro fesh. 

1. A rice spoon. This is FANTASTIC for carving pumpkins. The edges of the spoon are thin enough and sharp enough to scoop out your pumpkin guts beautifully and the handle end works great for carving the face. If you don't have one of these spoons, they can be bought for a mere dollar at your local China town store. Also, they make great cereal spoons!

2. A permanent marker. In your Chinese home it probably won't be Sharpie, because those are like gold here, but any permanent marker will do. This is for drawing your pumpkin face of choice. 

3. A screwdriver set. For the rest of our Jack-o-lantern carving lives I am using a screwdriver set. These worked perfectly for carving the face! We drew on their faces, gave each child a mini screwdriver and let them poke holes all along the lines. Perfect!

4. Last but not least, a knife. No explanation needed. Except, maybe, don't let the kiddos use the big guns. **Also needed: Pumpkins & tea lights

Let's not forget the most important part, the pumpkin!! As you can see, at local markets and grocery stores they only sell the small, baking pumpkins. Though they were small, they worked great for the kids! **Qingdao tip: If you want bigger pumpkins in Qingdao, you can get them, but you'll need to take a trip to Lao Shan and buy them from local farmers. 

We started out pumpkin carving adventure with our students by letting them choose stencils from online. We printed them out, without thinking through the obvious, big stencils, small pumpkins. Instead of using the stencils on the pumpkins, we ended up using them as guidelines for drawing. **Obvious tip: Scale your stencils print outs to the size of your pumpkin, before printing. 

Their pumpkins turned out awesome! They had so much fun doing something that have never done before! It's such a joy to introduce kids to new things. They get so excited and it makes us feel like we're kids again, carving pumpkins for the first time ourselves.

Jake all night kept asking me if he could eat his pumpkin. Ha. I don't know why but he was pretty curious and set on eating it. I guess it wasn't has good as he expected. 

They were hams taking photos with their pumpkins. 

Jake's ghost Jack-o-lantern

Avril's cat

Ivy's reversible Jack-o-lantern. A face and a ghost. 

Gary's angry bird pumpkin.

Justin's skull pumpkin.

Next step, light those pumpkins up! :) The best part!

We were so proud of them on how they all turned out! And had so much fun carving pumpkins in China. It's those little things that really make the holidays feel more like home and help us appreciate those fun traditions we grew up with.