A Happy Halloween 2023

It is that time of year again. (For A Happy Halloween 2022, click here)

A time when many of us gentle parents are wondering how Halloween got to be front yards full of doll heads and clowns with knives.

When my children were young, they loved to dress up and of course enjoyed the treats, but were not keen on going door to door. Our neighbourhood goes ALL OUT at Halloween. I’m talking houses featured in newspapers and magazines because of the work that goes into creating a scary Halloween scene. You can’t walk more than a few houses without scenes of horror and the possibility someone might jump out at any time. It is pretty intense. Halloween as we know it is marketed as a children’s festival but it really has shifted to something very adult.

Over the years we discovered so many ways to create a fun gathering for our family and friends. It helped with the feelings of missing out, even though they didn’t want to participate.

1. Create or attend a Jack-O-Lantern walk, where everyone brings their carved pumpkins, lines them all up in a row and it forms a sort of pumpkin parade! Everyone brought treats to share and the park where we met had a fire pit we could use for roasting hot dogs and marshmallows. Creating lanterns
2. Create a back yard fair with bobbing for apples, pumpkin carving, pin the nose on the jackolantern and a simple puppet show and you are good to go!
3. Create a simple tradition of decorating your windows with “happy” Halloween paper decorations, twinkle lights and some candles.
4. Have a family movie night! Pull the curtains shut and snuggle down to watch a festive film. For the younger set, we loved the Little Bear Halloween compilation DVD and Curious George Halloween Boo Fest. For children who are older we shifted focus and watched Coco to discover the roots of Halloween as we know it.
5. If you enjoy decorating the outside of your home, as my children did, we found that so many families really appreciated our happier decorations of fairy house pumpkins and funny skeletons with smiling bats and a scarecrow or two. There is no need to participate in the horror if it doesn’t suit your family values, but that doesn’t mean you have to totally withdraw from the festivities!
6. My children absolutely adored handing out treats to the children trick or treating. It was a fun way for them to participate and see all the costumes without having to be “out in the wild”.
7. If you would like your family to participate in trick or treating, one way to make it more manageable is to choose the number of houses before you go out, visit people your children know, or do a trick or treat party with friends in a park or even within your own house!

Here is a video tutorial for a fun origami ball you can turn into pumpkins orJack-o-Lanterns and pop over top LED lights to create a glowing banner.

PDF of the tutorial coming soon!

Until next time,
Marina