跨文化的饗宴-外語中心萬聖節暨感恩節系列活動

Halloween and Thanksgiving 2021

By Armon Nakprasert, Foreign Language Center

          Since this was our second year into the pandemic, the Foreign Language Center hosting of the annual Halloween activities such as the haunted house and bobbing for apple contest has been canceled (CURSE YOU COVID-19!). However, I tried my best to bring the Halloween spirit of Samhain to my students. (the following sentences are to be read with the best frightful voice that you can evoke) I decorated my classroom with frightful skeletons and ghoulish monsters. I dressed in scary (not really) costumes while teaching about the history and customs of Halloween in the U.S. We played games of unimaginable peril and misfortune. We consume an exuberant amount of candy that will make dentists all over Taiwan scream in madness and terror!  Drop by my classroom, IF YOU DARE, and say “trick-or-treat” for a piece of candy. Wha-ha-ha, wha-ha-ha-ha-ha…. (back to your regular reading voice) Happy Halloween everyone, and see you again soon for Thanksgiving.

          (Soon after). It is Thanksgiving time once again. Like Halloween, Thanksgiving is also greatly affected by COVID-19. This year is particularly harder for me because I, like most people around the world, was unable to travel and have not seen my family in three years now. Of course, I still speak with them over social media weekly. However, there is much to be said about the "in-person" experience of being with family and friends during Thanksgiving. It is this in-person experience with my family and friends in the states that I miss the most. I miss waking up to the smell of my mom cooking the Thanksgiving meal. Watching American football with my brother and dad waiting to eat. Eating the Thanksgiving meal together (due to our differing schedules, family meals in my house was a rarity growing up). Later, on Thanksgiving night, I would get together with friends and we would go to the movies, our annual Thanksgiving night movie. Movies are generally released on Fridays or Wednesdays, however, Thanksgiving and Christmas have always been the exception to this rule, therefore, making Thanksgiving (and Christmas) an exceptional time of year.  

          I am endlessly thankful for the in-person connections that I have with my students. I love telling them about Thanksgiving traditions and my family’s Thanksgiving traditions during my Thanksgiving activity classes. It is bittersweet, though, telling my students about my Thanksgiving experiences conjures up happy memories while making me miss my family and friends even more. It does, however, bring me endless joy to help my students create their own in-person Thanksgiving memory that when they get to my age, they can reflect on with happiness. Happy Thanksgiving.

¢208 鄭力云

This Thanksgiving activity class was really fun !  Thanks, Teacher Armon !  You taught us about this interesting American holiday ! I liked this class a lot because we learned about a different culture,  American culture.  It was surprising !  We watch videos,  I thought it was pretty funny !  We played some games with a spongy American football trying to hit paper turkeys with it.  It was easy for me,  I hit a turkey! I threw it and a turkey fell, everyone said :  “wow!” Lastly,  we watched a funny movie, everyone laughed because the movie is really funny! I want to keep watching,  but the bell rang, the teacher turned off the movie, 

I thought to myself,  “Oh, why can’t we keep watching the movie? ”

I want to stay in this class and learn more about Thanksgiving.

¢402陳育婷

Thanksgiving is a special day Americans celebrate to give thanks for all of the good things in their lives.  We learned in Mr.  Armon's class that the original holiday dates back to the Native Americans helping the puritan immigrants from England.  This act of kindness became the Thanksgiving holiday.  However,  people in the US celebrate it in different ways. Some have parades,  most will have a big dinner with a turkey and a pumpkin pie, and so on.  The main point of the holiday is the spirit of giving “thanks.”  Thanks for and to everything that we have.

I think maybe this year I can celebrate this special day by telling my family and friends how grateful I am to have them in my life.  I want to thank my parents for everything that they have given me.  I want to give thanks to my friends for giving me so much support and company when I am down. Happy Thanksgiving to all !

¢401  楊舒惟

   When we walked into the classroom. Mr. Armon was dressed and ready for the Halloween special activities class. He was dressed up as Clark Kent with a Superman shirt under his white dress shirt. The blackboard was decorated with plastic skeletons and paper jack-o-lanterns, and some stickers of Halloween characters, such as vampires and Frankenstein monsters, were stuck on the wall.

    The class started with a video that showed a celebrity going into a haunted house. In the video, the celebrity kept screaming. That made the atmosphere scarier in the classroom. After the video, Mr. Armon began to introduce some Halloween activities in the USA. For instance, trick-or-treating, rolling a yard, and costume parties. Many of them sound fun and exciting!

We also played games in class. The first one was “stick the tail on the black cat blindfolded (after spinning around, of course). I thought my classmates did pretty well with this game. “Guessing the most popular things about Halloween” was the second game. Our team lost because of our incredible bad luck and timing. It was kind of disappointing that we didn’t even get one point! However, we still got candy, and that made me feel better for losing the game. At last, Halloween bingo ended the class. My bad luck kept going, so I didn’t get any bingo. Though I lost all the games, I still had fun with the activities. It reminded me of the happy times when I was in kindergarten. We celebrated Halloween every year then.