While most children think of October as the time of the year when they get to spend one night amassing a year’s worth of treats, one Cub Scout troop from Pennsylvania took a different approach to the concept of giving Halloween goodies.
At their recent weekly meetings, the boys of Cub Scout Pack 3250, who hold their meeting at the Clark’s Grove Church in Paxinos, Pa., have been busy preparing for the annual Halloween parade in Shamokin, Pa., by creating decorations for their troop float. With the help of parents they crafted trees made out of cardboard cylinders and tree branches, as well as ghosts and bats that would be hanging from the trees on the float.
While it may sound pretty normal for a Halloween parade, what made this parade float unique was the theme and the name that they chose for it. It’s called “It’s Scary To Be Hungry,” and at this year’s parade, instead of the Scouts throwing candy to the children in the crowd, the Scouts will be the ones on the receiving end.
“We wanted to teach the boys that there is more to Halloween than just scares and sweets,” Barb Cerklefskie, Den Leader, said.
At the parade that was held on Wednesday, Oct. 27, the Cub Scouts, in conjunction with Boy Scout Troop 250, collected non-perishable food items, which were then to be donated to a local charity. Keeping with the “scary to be hungry” theme and Halloween spirit, the Cub Scouts dressed in costumes, but they didn’t dress as their favorite superhero or even a scary ghoul or ghost — they all dressed as skeletons, bare-boned from being hungry. And since all of the Cub Scouts are little guys, they rode on the float, while the Boy Scouts, collected the food items from members of the community and handed them to the starving skeletons.
Before the parade, the Troops reached out to the community through the local newspaper, asking for people to bring any items they would like to donate to the Halloween parade.
All of the items collected were to be donated to Manna for the Many, a local charity organization that provides non-perishable food and other goods to needy families in the area. In addition to helping collect the food items, the Scouts will also help stock shelves at the charity and pass out food to the needy families in the community.
“The way that we came up with this idea for the parade was that since October is responsibility month for our pack, we decided to combine the parade float with a food drive,” Cerklefskie said.
Cerklefskie also said that the idea for the theme came from a parent who previously lived in the South and participated in a similarly named Halloween food drive called “Scary to be Hungry.”
While most kids will always remember Halloween as the time during their childhood when they would spend one night a year traveling door-to-door collecting enough candy to cause tooth decay in all 20 of their teeth, these boys will remember it as the time they gave treats back to the community instead of seeing what treats it had to offer them. Although Halloween may be a scary time of their year, it’s even scarier to be hungry.
Photo by Tom Leskin.