Spooky Spring 2019

After the success of the 2018 event, we knew that there was a desire for a safe, fun Halloween event in our home town of Turangi, so we decided to go even bigger for 2019. Unfortunately, it is likely to be our last major event as Victoria's health began to rapidly decline shortly afterwards, but it was still a fun time had by all.

The idea behind Spooky Spring was to combine the fun of the Halloween season with the actual season appropriate in our hemisphere. Pumpkins and autumn colour schemes aren't quite the right thing for us here in New Zealand, but we've never really developed our own cultural traditions for the event since it was never really "ours".

But, a large portion of the population in Turangi is of Italian and Greek ancestry, so that gave us the idea to draw on Greek mythology for the event. After all, in Greek myth, the God of the Underworld (Hades) is married to the Goddess of Spring (Persephone).

In 2018, we basically just had a party and gave away free candy. Lots of people asked for more activities for the kids to actually do, though. So, we decided that in 2019 we were going to do something more like an interactive play. We dressed a bunch of volunteer actors up as various characters from Greek mythology, and created a little village for them to "live" in. The idea was that the kids were descending into the Greek Underworld to go trick-or-treating off the damned.

It didn't quite work out as intended due to time and budget constraints, but it was still a great time and enjoyed by a large percentage of the town. Scroll down to check out pictures of the event, and sketches of the original planning for the curious.

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