Keeping up Traditions in Care Homes
How to continue halloween traditions in care homes
Value traditional celebrations over the new commercialised versions
Covid has changed the way traditions are continued in care homes, but this doesn’t mean that such traditions need to be stopped completely
What is your care home going to do about Halloween? It depends on where you are in the country and who lives in your home…and a bit of magic and imagination.
Halloween traditions in Care Homes
The parties and traditions we will celebrate on Saturday October 31 originate from an old Celtic festival when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. The Romans were famous for incorporating the traditions of people they conquered and their feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruit and trees fell around this time of year. If you have apples in your garden, you’ll know this is the time to be thankful for this harvest, and hopefully you gathered them in before the magpies and wasps had them. In the eighth century Pope Gregory lll introduced November 1st celebrations to honour all saints, and that’s now called All Saints Day.
Traditions from youth
Many older people have a distaste for the commercial Halloween merchandise in shops, with the emphasis on horror and death. We are glad to honour the dead but plastic gravestones and purple skeletons are not really what is needed. The emphasis on witchcraft in parties, games and costumes has been imported to Europe from the United States. Now it’s a completely secular event, and in my memory as a child we dressed up for parties and visited neighbours where we would be given sweets or a toffee apple in exchange for a song. In Scotland we did not have pumpkins and would stolidly carve a face out of a turnip in an exercise that seemed to take days but made good soup, even if the burning candle inside made a horrid smell. The idea of threatening behaviour in “trick or treating” is very modern and more of a worry than fun.
It would not be surprising if right now, staff in care homes were struggling with stress and finding it difficult to do anything other than live from day to day. Nevertheless, I’m hearing lots of stories of care homes where the key values of having fun while caring have not been lost at this time. Promoting a positive culture of care may not be at the top of the agenda for public health officials who are stolidly counting cases of infection and causes of death. But a care home is about much more than that.
Celebration ideas and Covid 19
So how do you celebrate in a way that is fun for residents and staff? Frightening costumes, and surprises are inappropriate. It can be fun to make lamps out of pumpkins which are inexpensive in the supermarket at this time. Using a torch rather than the candles we used to use makes more sense. The dining room can be decorated with bunting. Cute black cats, owls, bats and pumpkins might go down better than skeletons and ghosts. Bobbing for apples might be tricky for residents, but if staff will do it for a spectator sport, it can raise a laugh. Another version is “fork bobbing” where you can throw a fork and if it touches the apple in the water basin, you’ve won!
Children, halloween and care homes
This year it is not possible to have local children come in with fancy dress, but residents could judge a fancydress competition either for staff, or for both residents and staff. There can be hours of entertainment preparing the party food and the costumes.
We all look forward to future years when we will be able to invite in singers and entertainers, but this year we send our best wishes to those homes that are doing their level best to keep smiles on the faces of residents, and distract us all from what is going on outside homes.
If anybody has photos of Halloween fun in care homes and would like the world to see, send them in and we will show everyone.
If you would like more information, you can buy my book Dementia, the One Stop Guide or Care Homes: When, Why and How to Choose a Care Home. I am available for consultancy for families or organisations. And if you have any further queries or questions, or suggestions for something you’d like to see me write on, please contact me via the Contact Page
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