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!

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Apple bobbing outside. Just needs a bucket, some apples and plenty of towels! Good fun. Also look online for toffee apple recipes. Great fun.

Making coloured fudge, decorating gingerbread men, pumpkin picking, carving and making pumpkin soup / pie out of the flesh, dressing up and facepainting

We go guising because we're in Scotland.

Me and my son (almost 6) spend a lot of time doing Halloween crafts in the run up.
We tend to make our own decorations and bunting, lots of warm glowing lights and fake candles, a Halloween wreath for the front door. He doesn’t like it to be too spooky (he’s absolutely a Christmas lover more than a Halloween fan), but he enjoys picking a couple of pumpkins which we usually carve into a whimsical, comical looking face rather than anything too scary or evil!
We also grow our own pumpkins in the garden now (this is a new tradition that we started this year after moving into our first home) and we have a slightly wonky, runty one (hence my username) which we managed to harvest, which will be on display all autumn!

Halloween Pjs come out and I always get him a Halloween themed bedtime story too - this year it is Mr Men: “Mr Happy’s Halloween party.”

My own personal tradition just for me, which I’ve done for years, is to watch “The Nightmare before Christmas”. My favourite childhood spooky film.

I love everything about spooky season and Halloween! 🎃

Of course pumpkin carving is a must every year!

We also like baking, at Halloween we will use food colouring the make the cakes green and then decorate them with orange/red/black icing trying to make them look a bit spooky.

We've got the traditional pumpkin but I'm going to give my toddler some paint and let him go wild! He's suddenly really interested in Halloween and it's very sweet/ very exciting for his first Christmas where he will know what is going on

DS and I are making toffee apples this year and marshmallow ghosts (draw a spooky face with edible pen on a marshmallow pop it in the microwave to watch it grow).
He loves to decorate the windows with spooky stickers and pictures he has drawn but his favourite Halloween activity is sneaking up on DH in different masks to make him jump

carving the pumkin.(save innards at the end for roasting rice dish or soup)
we used to save the pips and plant them. then the next year find the smallest pumkin we could in the shops and plonk it there as if by magic! theyd grown one.

then get a baking or casserole dish. place in a good helping of flower, then stick chocolates (heros etc) in with the tops sticking out.
then get your bowl of water with apple in.
and so you have to apple bob. then stick your head in the flower for a chocoalte. of course the aim being not to get your wet face to fkoured up.( of course made easier when its the kids go by stick the stalks right up with the apples,keep long ones for them and making sure the chocs are almost out the flour.

also make cardboard bats out of any material you have. doesnt need to be black card sought out which like most things kees upping its cost. so it could be free pamphlets or old newspapers. paper drawn on with funny designs. then get a bit of sting or wool and put them up anywehre they like. on door knobs. stairs. their bedroom door handles. make a friendly spider too.

write spooky stories.

halloween food is sausages wrapped in strands of pastry.
melted white chocolate goasts
and making pizzas with extra sliced cheeses for the top to cut out ghost shapes.
and cut out ghost sandwhiches
jelly cups with sweets in
halloween stuffed peppers
dustinbin pasta(as in find all they can and chuck it in) within reason,with blood resto pesto
and witches couldron pea and ham soup

So many good ideas on here. We try and do lots of crafty stuff. I usually buy one of those Halloween themed craft rings and use it to make decorations for the house. Also second the CBeebies magazine - such good value for the amount of time we get out of it.

My DD is tube fed and my DS is too little for sweets so this year I've made cheap and cheerful sensory bottles for them instead. Coloured rice in one, leaves, conkers and spiders in another, one filled with slime etc. Also I have one of those sensory bin tables which I'll fill with orange and green jelly with plastic spiders and scoops.

Rubbish.

My birthday is near Halloween so as a child I had more than one halloween party. And that would be in the 1970s.

Carving pumpkins? My mum would carve swede!

Dunking for apples, halloween 'spells' eg peeling an apple and throwing the peel over your shoulder to find you future spouse's initials.

I'll be putting on my witches hat and sitting be the door with a bowl of sweets.

Last year we made rice krispie buns with matchstick legs for trick or treaters, we may try apple bobbing this year, but we have bought a pumpkin to carve with a scary face - we have used last years halloween costume.

Carving neeps (they are more traditional and creepy than pumpkins, Haloween isnt Halloween without the smell of burnt neep...).
Dooking for apples.
Treacle pancakes.
Monkey nuts that nobody eats.
Guising with kids doing "a bit" instead of trick or treating.

No. It is a tradition in many parts of the UK and was important in the 70s for me and the 40s for my parents.
It might not be a tradition for you, that's fine, but it is a big childhood tradition for many, not "ridiculous".

My sister and her family come over and the kids dress up. We decorate the house and garden. Then we project a Halloween laser show onto the house over the road (they don’t mind), fire up the snow and the fog machine and provide a magical Halloween experience for the neighbours kids. 😁

Watching Hocus Pocus for the gazillionth time

Every year we carve our pumpkins, bake halloween cakes, make ‘cat’ pie for tea and watch Hocus Pocus. Now my son is an antisocial teenager I anticipate this year I’ll probably be made to do the baking and watch the film by myself though!

we play apple bobbing in blackcurrent fruit juice - just to liven up the game, make fudge and cornflake buns for trick or treaters, dress up as ghosts and werewolves and watch out of the window the people dressed up walking past.

We enjoy halloween and tend to do things during half term as it falls near the 31st. Things we do are-

1. pumpkin picking at a local field and then home to carvr
2. trip to local country park that always does a halloween trail around the grounds
3. watch hocus pocus
4. decorate the house
5. bake spooky treats
6. do halloween themed crafts
7. got to a farm or theme park that has halloween events running
8. walk in the dark bat spotting
9. 9. dress up on halloween and go trick or treating

I hate to bring down the tone but please don't dress up in bin bags, they're very flammable and because they're plastic they then stick to the skin and there are lots of candles around at halloween.

Switch all the lights off and sit in darkness 😉

(can I just add DC are adults and have been for a decade).

Bobbing apples & baking spooky treats!

In theory, I like an old-fashioned traditional Halloween with scary costumes apple bobbing, turnip carving, a selection of apple-based divination games and barmbrack with fortune telling charms in, ghost stories, sparklers, toffee apples, and spooky games.

But in practice, although I still like to do a lot of the traditional stuff,I prefer pumpkins to turnips and have a more modern traditional meal of black spaghetti tossed in garlic and olive oil with "eyeball meatballs" (each meatball has a stuffed olive inside so it looks like an eyeball) and tomato-based "blood" sauce in a jug to pour on the pasta.

We have a Mickey and Minnie mouse countdown to halloween decoration. We also have a Sneak a Boos bat called Boo who brings one of our halloween book for the bedtime story each night of October. I hang up paper spiders or ghost in the garden and before bedtime and have a hunt for them with torches. We go pumpkin picking and have a Halloween breakfast by cutting out spooky shapes in croissant dough. I wasn't allowed to celebrate it as a child so tend to go overboard!

We love halloween in our house. We put on a spooky play list and make some decorations. This year we've used air drying clay! At 4 and (a very sensitive) 5 they're still a bit too young for the more classic Halloween films so we'll be watching some more gentle cartoons.
We also have a halloween tea party on halloween before the trick or treating starts. I try to make scary looking food but it usually just looks messy!
We also try to tie in halloween with noticing the seasons changing, we've been to a beautiful arboretum in previous years that has a halloween trail. It's incredible this time of year.
We're lucky to live in a street with lots of other families so we make it a nice social occasion and the kids all enjoy it 👻