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
Insight T&Cs apply

We have none. Nov 5th is the celebration here.

My DC love the idea of pumpkin carving but they don't like pumpkin, it's hard, it's messy and seems such a waste, so instead, I buy orange peppers which they can carve easily themselves and snack on the bits they cut out as they go. A battery tealight still fits inside and it looks quite cute.

We love to eat pumpkins, so we try new recipes each year. This year we also went pumpkin picking and youngest wants to go again! Recipes so far include, pumpkin soup, pumpkin and bacon soup, pumpkin scones, pumpkin gratin, pumpkin pie (no one liked it!) And a vegan pumpkin cake - very 😋 yummy.

I used to love a Halloween party when the children were young. Try making up a green coloured jelly. Pour the liquid jelly into an old washing up glove or stretchy disposable glove. Then clip it onto fridge shelf by the cuff with a clothes peg. When it’s set remove from glove. Use as a creepy and clammy dead zombie hand.

Tutankhamun Brain

Line a sieve with clingfilm, add a column of rolled up tin foil down the centre so it looks like 2 lobes
Cheap strawberry jelly made very strong , add some food colour .
Cook pasta till really soft (penne . macaroni ) add to jelly

Into lined sieve till set , turn out , remove foil and film.
We made a snazzy looking Eyptian contaiiner from an empty food box .

Make cornflake buns in cases and stick matchmakers in to make legs - turn upside down and make halloween spiders, play apple bobbing, make costumes out of old pillow cases and sheets.

😂😂😂

We decorate scary gingerbread figures

Buy those mini pumpkins from supermarkets that are £1... you can get white ones too. Let the children decorate them with sharpies, craft materials and pva glue. Not a carving knife in site, and they love it!

We have a huge spider decoration. It is available to buy every year from supermarkets/cheaper shop B&M and it’s brilliant each year it gets a bit shabbier but the huge tinsel legs hang over our lounge.
I’ve had said spider since before I had kids it’s an old bird now. I’ve now padded out the body with recycled bags wrapped in a black bin bag as I can’t part with it.
We have a shelf of small pumpkins/ghosts mini spiders in the kitchen and I have added a light up Halloween spooky tree to hang decorations on (often with what the kids make at nursery - 2 and 3 year old - to showcase their cute creations)🤣
We put our pumpkins in the garden after Halloween and whilst it sounds gross we let them rot in the soil as we live in a new build hoping it enriches the soil and teaches the kids about decomposition.
I love this season though and love adding to our decorative collection each year with cheap bits of Halloween stuff. Maybe one day it will be memorabilia!! 🤣🤣

The name game is one of our favorite halloween games. Any age can play, and it's easy to give it a Halloween theme. Give each person a sticky note with a popular Halloween word (ghost, vampire, zombie, mummy, spell, mask...) costume idea, or famous monster name and have them place it on their forehead. Ask questions until they figure out what they are.

Halloween bake off!

We do all of the front room and garden up in Halloween decorations,we usually have a different creepy theme each year, I buy in tons of sweets for the Trick or Treaters because we usually get 100 or more children(we're known in the area for our displays and treats)I love Halloween.

About a week before we'll buy the sweets and our DC and my DH helps me get them all bagged up and ready.

We always buy pumpkins and toffee apple's a few days before and then the night before Halloween I'll carve the pumpkins with the children,the night before Halloween the indoor decorations are put up and then the morning of Halloween we'll decorate the garden.

Halloween night we take it in turns to go to the door and in between we'll be watching a Halloween movie and drinking some Halloween punch(my lovely Dad's idea and recipe and non alcoholic)that I've made and eating some Halloween snacks(thank you M&S)and I'll make some buffet food ready for when the last trick or treaters have been and we'll have that,some more punch and our toffee apple's whilst we watch a 2nd movie.

In the past we've had massive Halloween party's with children and adults,family and friends and we've played Halloween games and had the whole of the house decorated and tons of Halloween themed food and homemade creepy cakes and drinks, whilst seeing to trick or treaters and taking our DC all trick or treating but the youngest of our 5DC is 16 now so we get to have a more relaxed Halloween 👻🎃.

Making fudge for trick or treaters - different favours - put in little bags, making peppermint creams (icing sugar mint essence and egg white) and pipe on spiders, pumpkin carving, apple bobbing

Watch Hocus-Pocus and carve pumpkins 👻 'I put a spell on you - and now your mi-i-i-ne'

Autumn picture frames using sticky back plastic and leaves etc. collected on welly walks. Put in a picture from a pumpkin farm visit. Lovely to see the evolution of size of child and crafting ability as time goes on.

Make a trick or treat bowl full of sweets, wrapped is best, get a roll of wallpaper and draw around your DC's whilst they lay flat on the paper - and get them to colour in scary monsters in the drawn shape and hang on the wall - face paints and fancy dress

I make small chocolate muffins in large squares of baking paper instead of paper cases. If you put them on a stick they look like ghosts in white sheets.

Jam tarts with lime marmalade and gummy worms can be swamp pies.

I tried to make mummified hands out of frankfurters and strips of pastry but they were Instagram ”nailed it” worthy…

If you can sacrifice a mandarin orange to draw on they make great mini Jack o’lanterns but indelible black ink is the only one that will stick, so not for eating!

Lidl Greek yoghurt buckets covered in paper are good as baskets. And a good toddler costume is black clothes, green hat and a crepe paper 🎃 safety pinned on.

We did Halloween/autumn biscuit decorating on Saturday and we’re going to go to a pumpkin patch at some point soon. We’re thinking of going to a restaurant we like before Halloween as they’re doing lots of Halloween activities for little ones!! We will probably go to a Toddler Sense Halloween class too!! Then on Halloween we’re going to a Little Movers Halloween class and we will be taking ds(2) trick or treating for the first time!! :)

I am running a small village youth event & me & my DS5 have been crafting for weeks to make old school style fun fair games & decorations, it will be for free & no competition unless the kids want to compete against family members for instance but I'm just setting up tables with instructions on the game & the parents are in charge for that game (as I will have DS5 & DD18 months in tow on my own)

So simple but he's so engaged
We have made ;

• Splat the bat (drainpipe on wood & mallet & head splatting toys from pound shop
• Pin the spider on the web (black paper white paint for web then made cardboard spiders)
• spider crawl (blowing a small plastic spider down a table into a bought web with a straw)
• how many eyeballs in the jar (conkers with white bits painted then coloured iris')
• eyeball target where it's just a painted spiderweb on black paper on a table & everyone gets 5 eyeball conkers to roll to be tee of target
• hoop the witches hat (witches hat from pound store propped up on drinks bottles then throw hoops over)
• knock over the ghosts (faces drawn on white plastic cups into pyramid then throw ping pong eyeball) my son drew the faces
• grave digging - freeze various things into ice for the kids (bigger for younger) & give them a spoon to pick at it (for younger on tuff tray)
• bought plain ceramic pumpkins to draw on with porcelain pens
• s'mores & hot choc

/ help me doctor - x ray pictures to identify the bones (or injury for olders)

• trick or treat boxes which are tubs with lids on and holes to reach in to touch various things (spaghetti, conifer maggots, peeled grapes etc)
• at the end say I have hidden bits of skeleton around & they need to find one each & put them in the box (tidying right?) to claim their bag of sweets to take away (where I'm unwrapping some fool pumpkin choc balls & rewrapping Brussel sprouts in their place as a trick)

And various decorations! I have other games in reserve too but I think that's enough 😝
Should be good

Definitely carving a pumpkin lantern. Also making pumpkin pie and watching the Nightmare Before Christmas. I’ve stopped buying sweets and chocolates for trick or treaters, as we’d always eaten most of them before Halloween even arrived!🤭

We did monster cupcakes last year, which I think I'll make a tradition. As long as you've got at least one sugar eye to pop on top of the icing, it's quite hard to mess up a monster cupcake.

I didn’t do much as a child, just apple bobbing & trick or treating, plus we carved a pumpkin. Never been into Halloween parties or full on decorating. DD14 will dress up & go trick or treating & I’ll get some sweets, although we get very few callers.

We always bake sugar cookies and decorate in a different theme each year. One year bats, then pumpkins, then witches etc. it’s my favourite time

Add food dye to biscuits, icing and cupcakes to make ghoulish treats, green black and red added to buttercream and dough makes a fun activity.