St John’s Care Home celebrates Halloween

Halloween is always fun at St Johns Care Home, in Melrose, and this year was no exception, even though residents and staff had to adapt to social distancing. Wellbeing Coordinator Denise reports.

“We celebrated a ‘lockdown style’ Halloween by decorating parts of the home with little pumpkin lights, fake spiders and webs. For our activities, we kept with the Halloween theme, discussions and chats on the origin of Halloween, mazes and word searches.”

St John’s residents have been using the Daily Chat Nostalgic Newspaper for a number of years, which for Halloween included some fun ‘Down Memory Lane’ articles with a seasonal flavour – even a scary Halloween poem!

Denise says the residents had a lot of fun enjoying their Halloween treats. “Our Chef, Dawne, made Halloween biscuits and we had cupcakes with edible ghosts and witches. These were delivered to the ladies’ rooms with pumpkin paper serviettes on our afternoon tea trolley. Audrey, Mary, Doris, Eleanor and our wonderful 103-year-old Mary enjoyed their treats with hot drinks, and some of them watched the Scotland vs Wales rugby match.

It was a fun, frivolous celebration, albeit in a different ‘ lockdown’ way”, says Denise. “It made for an entertaining afternoon on a weekend, and much relief from the normal routine activities – much needed at this time.”

Thank you to Kayleigh and Amy for the lovely photographs.