#CarveAHeart & a Costume Safety Request. Keeping Children Safe.

Thanks @worldvisionuk for our #carveaheart kit

This is really a post to ask you to decide to donate £5 tonight, by texting HEART to 70060 so that WorldVision can keep on with their work to try and make Halloween a night where all children can have fun and laughter and treats. In too many places in the world, October 31st is simply another night in fear, danger, squallor – in a warzone or a refugee camp or an orphanage or a hospital that has no supplies, no promise of safety and no help coming.

We’ve seen this on our doorstep this year in Europe and we are still not doing enough to fix it. So every £5 counts.

It’s the cost of a pumpkin. But the cost of not doing so if more than a bag of sweets elsewhere.

Please donate. 

***

I’m going to combine this post with a request this year for you to think carefully what you do tonight. I walked around the places selling costumes for our kids this week (at £3, £5, £8 – there is a whole other story in what the cost of £5 is to someone elsewhere in the world…) and been horrified that the high profile injuries caused to Claudia Winkleman’s daughter by a flammable costume and a carelessly placed flame have not produced enough change in the costume industry. SOME of the supermarkets have made changes – it needs to be law.

Who on earth thinks it is okay to make costumes from flammable materials to wear on the night of the year that these precious little people are most likely to be near a flame? How did it take a near tragedy for common sense to begin to override profit margins? I’m astonished that instead of picking up the ball and demanding change, I’ve seen more threads of forum comments deriding a mother buying the same costumes we all do. It’s despicable.

So this year please, while you save children from misery elsewhere with £5, please do one or more of a few different things:-

• Hand make your costume using real clothes that have to resist fire.
• Use a fake candle in your pumpkin so they cannot do harm.
• If you must use a candle, carefully carve it so the ‘lid’ can be replaced to guard it and place your pumpkin well out of the way of trailing costumes. The supermarkets might be bringing in changes but there will be plenty of hand-me-down costumes and one’s bought from £1 shops that aren’t safe.
• Ditch the old costumes and buy them from somewhere that has already upgraded their standard to nightwear safety levels.