Halloween is tomorrow and for a good portion of the English-speaking world, the event will be celebrated with children dressing up for trick-or-treating and adults going in costume to parties.  According to Robin May’s Holidays and Festivals: Halloween, Halloween had its origins in northern Celtic Europe — Britain, Ireland and northern France in particular.  The festival has long been associated with witches, the dead, ghosts and mischief much as it still is today.  It predates as well as precedes the Christian holy days of All Saints’ and All Souls, together known as Hallow Tide.

North Americans celebrate the event with trick-or-treating.  Children dress up and venture out into the neighborhood to gather candy by calling out “Trick or Treat”  at people’s doors.  Having grown up in Canada, I have very fond memories of going out trick-or-treating and now enjoy accompanying my children.  What has been specially memorable for my family growing up was introducing the holiday to Japanese kids who were experiencing the event for the first time.

Of course, this being Poetry Friday, I wondered if there might be any poetry books on the event as it is celebrated here.  Sure enough, at my local library I found Halloween Poems selected by Myra Cohn Livingston, illustrated by Stephen Gammell.  There are a lot of wonderful poems here about witches and skeletons, ghosts and jack-o-lanterns.   I liked the wry poem “Trick or Treating at Age Eight” where the little boy narrator comes to the conclusion that the only thing to fear on Halloween night are “the boys/a few years older/with legs a little longer,/hooting up and down the neighborhood/who chase me all the way home.”  And then there is the slightly spooky poem “We Three” where the little trick-or-treaters find an unexpected fourth in their group.  Gammell’s illustrations, accompanying the text, have an appropriately macabre comic feel to them — a little weird, but not too scary.  Halloween Poems makes for a delightful celebration of the season in poetry.

This week’s Poetry Friday host is Jennie at Biblio File.

Halloween is just around the corner for North Americans this week, so I’ve chosen a book that celebrates the event.  The Ghoul’s Night Out by Janice MacDonald (illus. by Pamela Breeze Currie) is a story about three ghouls — Annalise the Witch, Ernie the Ghost, and Milton the Skeleton — who experience Halloween trick-or-treating for the first time.  Normally these three happy occupants of a haunted house keep to themselves and enjoy Halloween from their perspective as ghouls.  One step out onto the yard on Halloween night ensures bagfuls of candy being dropped by fleeing and frightened trick-or-treaters.  Although Annalise wouldn’t mind if some of these kids would drop in for a chat, she’s quite happy to be the recipient of their largesse.

One autumn, however, the ghouls are prompted by a newspaper article to get involved in their community.  They decide the best way to do this is to go trick-or-treating themselves at Halloween.  What ensues is a comic adventure for the three civic-minded ghouls whose hearts are in the right place, but er, their appearances, not so much!

The Ghouls Night Out is a mid-grade reader aimed for kids, aged 6 to 10.   Divided into chapters with wonderful illustrations interspersed throughout, the story is best read a week or so before Halloween.  It’s an excellent primer for the season’s main event, occurring on October 31.  I’ve enjoyed reading this book to my kids before Halloween and recommend it highly.  It won the Our Choice Award given by the Canadian Children’s Book Centre at the time of its publication.   Do you have any good books that celebrate this special event for kids? Do tell!