We just finished celebrating Halloween. Your children dressed in wonderful costumes, you walked from house to house getting candy, your schools had parties and ton of candy was given away. This holiday was celebrated all over the country and probably in other countries as well. Last post I shared with you where Halloween came from and the folklore behind it but today I will take a larger step. I will look at how public libraries celebrated this holiday.
A few days ago I did a massive survey on a list called pub lib and asked a very simple question How does your library celebrate Halloween. I got a massive response to this question and have decided to give a list of 10 most unique stories that came from this list. This post will not have any book reviews and lets say I will catalog this under Cool Stuff. Please enjoy my list of 10.
1) The year we had the ground breaking for our building the same day as the Halloween parade so that as soon as that parade was over we had our parade from the old building to the new site. Thus the community band that played for our parade and ground breaking ceremony did it dressed in Halloween costumes. The last two years of the Optimists Halloween parade we entered a book truck drill team. The first year we each dressed as a story book character and put pictures on our book trucks to fit our character. The second year we all wore black with bright colored boas and decorated the carts for Halloween.
Meg Van Patten
2) This year, the teen party was on Saturday, 10/29. We started with a Haunted Library; the kids turned our entire building into a haunted maze, then played spook after dark. You know the sort of thing -- shelves blocked by spiderwebs and fabric panels spray-painted to look like blood, things hanging from the ceiling, black lights (which made this year's chair monster look super-freaky -- all eyes and teeth!) two different scary soundtracks playing in different areas, mechanical monsters and then people jumping out at you in the dark. Oh, and one of the librarians rocking like a mad woman in the story time chair and staring as she pressed the old-fashioned people-counting clicker.