If your school population likes the fun, cute side of Halloween or no Halloween at all, then this is not the book for you!

“In Britain, Ireland, America, Canada and now more and more countries, children- and grown-ups too- try to come up with their best disguises as witches, vampires, and other scary creatures, which haunt our bad dreams.”

This European written and published book has some hits and misses when it comes to the practice of Halloween in Washington State.

‘Sweets’ or candy = hit , covering a door with jam as a trick = miss, painting a cat green as a trick = miss, carving pumpkins = hit, making Halloween soup out of the carved pumpkin’s insides = miss, costumes and/or face make-up = hit, Halloween parties with themed food = hit ( but ‘devil’s pizza & death cake’= miss), and home-made paper Halloween decorations( with directions) = hit.

There is a little pre-Christian history included about the Celts.  “In the last century, the Irish took Halloween to America.”- but the illustration looks more like the 1700s than the 1800s, but this book was first published in 1998. And, there is a little history about the origin of the ‘pumpkin lantern’.