Share your Halloween activity ideas - £200 voucher to be won

[CeriMumsnet]

With Halloween just round the corner, we’d love you to share your favourite ways to celebrate as a family. Whether it’s spooky snacks and games ideas, a simple but effective costume, or you prefer heading to an event like LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Birmingham’s Brick or Treat Monster Party, share your Halloween plans and ideas in the thread below.

• Post your Halloween ideas in the thread below to be entered into a prize draw
• One lucky MNer will win a £200 voucher for a store of their choice (from a list).

Here’s what LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Birmingham has to say:
"With spooky season just around the corner, it’s time to start planning those spooktacular Halloween ideas. Join us at LEGOLAND Discovery Centre Birmingham for our awesome Brick or Treat: Monster Party event which runs from 30th September to 5th November. There are so many fang-tastic activities to sink your teeth into as well as two awesome rides, lots of LEGO build & play zones and a 4D cinema experience at the ultimate indoor LEGO® playground!"

Thanks and good luck with the prize draw!

MNHQ
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Hurrah for Halloween - we absolutely love it! Doesn't have to involve extra expense..

1. Apple bobbing is a classic, large plastic box/bucket of water (outside activity!!) - throw in a bag of apples & let them bob (supervised!) to their hearts content!
2. Pumpkin Carving (homegrown ones!) - this might be one for next year.. enjoy the journey of your pumpkins by sewing your own pumpkin seeds. They are SUPER easy to grow, don't involve any special care & they literally seem to spread overnight - a great one for kids to be involved in. You can pick up seeds in the sale section now for next year! Pumpkin carving shop-bought ones is still fun though!
3. Making Your Own Decorations - this is good if you have no money for Halloween decs, but lots of Halloween spirit! Draw some spooky shapes - skulls, pumpkins, ghosts, etc. & decorate them together as a family. Use whatever you have to hand - paints, wax crayons, felt tips - or you could collage them from old magazines. Carefully cut them out & stick on the windows. Fun to do, they look great & no extra expense.

Happy Halloween!

As a change to pumpkin carving, you could try turnip carving - that's what we did when I was a child. Turnips were the norm in the days before pumpkins were popular. They're smaller so you could do more than one for a spooky effect, and you can have neeps and tatties with what you scoop out instead of gallons of pumpkin soup!

We usually bake something like cupcakes in Halloween cases. Orange with black icing. Ghost biscuits.
We have food like scary burgers and watch scary age appropriate films.
I'm planning on listening to The Witch Farm with teen ds this year.

We've been collecting dry leaves and making pictures of pumpkins. Lots of glue and glitter for the outline and stalks!

Create your own 'bush tucker trial' with fun foods (halloween sweets, marshmallows - pretending they are eyeballs/witchty grubs etc) match sticks - pretending they are stick insects ... you get the idea - we did this last year as a family - pick a sweet- whilst the others told us what to imagine we are eating

Pumpkin carving - this tends to be messy and is very much DHs thing with the kids.

there’s usually a themed baking happening over half term, and at least one national trust “spooky trail” visit!

we decorate the front garden, usually the weekend before. our local area usually goes a bit nuts with the decorating and it is fun to look around. As a result, there’s usually insane numbers trick or treating in our street. Every year we fear running out of sweets. Not sure how many we’ll get this year as it’s falling after the half term on a school night.

We would go to the pumpkin farm near us - it's fresh so you can use the flesh to make a soup, and dye the seeds once dried to make halloween pictures and shakers

Oh yes turnips were the thing when I was young ! They were far more difficult to carve -Dad had to chisel out the middle with a razor sharp scoop tool . Then we did the eyes and mouth . Turnip smells when it burns too .

I made "Ghost Toast" for mine ( white bread, cut out a gingerbread man shape , toast the outer bit and replace the 'ghost' middle )
With Heinz Tomato Soup

DC are adults now , no decorating this year , we're going out for the evening

Turnip smells when it burns too

The memory of that smell takes me back 40 years!

And the wizzened wrinkled little turnip's face when you find it a week later after it was left outside

As it's MN lock your door, don't answer it and eat all the pick and mix yourself making it last the entire year with your black cat from a rescue.

Turn off the lights and pretend we are not home

Divide the children into two teams, one loo roll per child. One child in each team is chosen. The others have 2 minutes to use their loo rolls to turn this child into a mummy. The team with the best mummy wins.

Halloween crafts- making witches/bats/mummys/ghosts etc out of loo rolls.

We like to make chocolate apples and decorate them as spooky as possible!

I like to buy mini gingerbread people and let the kids decorate with white icing. They make mummies and skeletons usually

We have the Switch Witch.

DD goes trick or treating, keeps some, puts the rest out the back door in her bucket. And at some point the Switch Witch will take the sweets and switch them for a toy. Just a small one like a Lego blind bag, or a doll or a small car.

This is to stop the piles of sweets that just don't get eaten.

The other sweets get handed back out to trick or treaters or donated to the local primary school for a Christmas count the sweets I'm the jar/mini prizes for the Christmas fair

Make and decorate biscuits - (or just use shop bought ones) make faces, write messages (booo, hello, spooky, witch) Apple bobbing - great fun, there are so many great costumes - so have a halloween party with costumes and the food you've made

We have bat cookie cutters, so we make and decorate gingerbread bats, lots of purple icing, black glitter and sweetie eyes

Make little halloween ghosts out of marshmallows!
https://www.smartschoolhouse.com/easy-recipe/marshmallow-ghosts

We sit in the dark with curtains tightly drawn.

We do pumpkin spotting instead of trick or treating. When the kids spot a pumpkin they shout out and I put a treat in their bag. That way they get stuff I know they will like and we don't have to bother people

😂

Is the the point that pumpkin people want to be bothered?

And so what if they get stuff they don't like? They can pass it on....

It means we can do it any night round Halloween.