So, I’m sorry for going all “Winter holidays” there before enjoying the Fall. Halloween is probably my favorite holiday of all and I shouldn’t short change it like that. How rude! So I’m here to talk about candy, costumes and what’s going on instead of trick-or-treating and in-person parties this year. First, I love this idea for little kids or pretty much anyone:

Decorate for Halloween, make Halloween themed snacks, and have everyone in your household dress up in costumes. Then mix & match from these ideas:

• Take out some Halloween themed books or collections of ghost stories from your local library and have a read-aloud by candlelight or flashlight.
• Make a Facebook group and ask friends and family to dress in costume and post pics or do a Zoom gathering to show off costumes and socialize.
• Hokey monster movie marathon. (Godzilla and that era or any of the wondrously bad/hilarious sci-fi channel monster movies.
• Create and decorate a Halloween Tree. My middle daughter started this when she was 3. We were getting ready for a little Halloween party and she asked; “What about the Halloween Tree?” I was like; “whaaat?” and asked her if she meant the tree with the lights and decorations because that was definitely the Christmas Tree… yep that’s what she meant alright but it was a Halloween Tree and she obviously thought I was suffering from extreme early-onset dementia or something because i was clearly misremembering. SO, I made a Halloween Tree. All you need is some smallish dead branches and something of sufficient weight to hold them up. I used a vase full of stones. Just arrange the branches to look like a dead tree, add some lights and spooky decorations and you’re done. Our first tree had a small string of white lights but you can now buy orange or purple Halloween lights. For decorations We make ghost out of Kleenex and string with faces sharpied on them, and some pumpkins and cats cut out of colored paper. Ours is usually sized to make a great centerpiece.
• Bake some Halloween themed sugar cookies, the kind you cut with cookie cutters, and let the kids decorate and eat them. You could make this part of a Facebook group w/without costumes. Have friends and family share their kooky cookies.
• Find out what, if anything in these crazy times, your local library is offering for Halloween. I am having a Make-Your-Own Monster event with a randomly drawn prize, and offering take-home crafts of Fall lantern kits, shadow puppet kits, and friendship bracelets. My counterpart in children’s services is offering several take-home kits for the little ones. Some libraries might be having costume contests by having patrons submit photos.
• Some radio stations are definitely having costume contests w/submitted photos. One in my area is offering a prize of $100 or $200 on a debit card. (I can’t remember the amount)
• Make a round layer cake and decorate it to look like a Jack-o-lantern.
• If you and your kids or housemates play tabletop RPGs (Role Playing Games) run a special one-shot Halloween game. The possibilities here are nearly endless and can range from a child-friendly, goofy Scooby Doo vibe all the way to a Creepy, gritty, gorey Walking Dead/horror movie vibe. Call of Cthulhu is my go-to. One shots are perfect for it as player characters generally go insane when exposed to the Mythos anyway.
• Create a LARP, if you’re feeling ambitious, and have enough people in your household. LARP stands for Live Action Role Play and it can be a lot of fun. This one takes more prep than any of these other ideas because you need to have a plot, props, maybe an accomplice, etc. The simplest way to do this is to get your hands on a boxed Murder Mystery game that contains all the characters, clues, etc. A few years back I created my own LARP for my youngest when that’s what he wanted to do for Halloween. I had 3 days and no money to spend so it was unpolished to say the least. But it was fun. It involved splitting our group in 2, a scavenger hunt for one group so they could find a book about Halloween that contained clues as to what they had to do, and the other group had to come up with 2 word clues to try and help the first group when they got stuck. The second group had accidentally been pulled into the afterlife and were stuck in a waiting room with a booklet of their own outlining their situation. They also got snacks and hot cocoa. The first group had to find the clues, figure them out, and conduct a ritual to get group 2 back through the veil between worlds. I wrote the booklets and decorated them with woodcuts of skeletons and such from online and set up the afterlife waiting room in our shed.

I have a bit of a headache so that’s all I’ve got for right now. Please feel free to add your awesome ideas in the comments. Or your really dumb ideas, those can be a ton of fun! ^_^