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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We enjoy the pumpkin picking most. Big farm close to us, wellies on, spend far too long debating the merits of different pumpkins... 🎃

Once the decision has been made it's tea and cake time!

What don't we do! We go to a pumpkin patch for pictures every year, I decorate the home 'half way' as soon as its October and bring out the Halloween mugs and glasses. Start watching Halloween tv (adult and ceebeebies respectively) start reading gothic horror. Halloween themed events like national trust trails etc, going to a spooky garden set up thing with family, local smaller events like Halloween city. Ans the finale is a toddler Halloween party at our house! This is where I decorate properly (some sort of spectacle for the front window on our terraced street too, last year it was a tissue paper graveyard scene). All the kids come in fancy dress and parents encouraged to, we have Halloween themed games, Halloween themed prizes, we always do a craft at the party so kids and parents hVe a little keepsake. I set up stations and let the kids gravitate round. Halloween themed snacks of course (seperate set up for adults so guaranteed snot/saliva free). Of course we are all using cute Halloween plates and napkins etc. At the end I hide a bunch of Halloween chocolates around and give the kids a bag and they go hunting for their treats as an alternative to trick or treating. Then we clean up and husband and I have a takeaway and a few wines and I have the next day off work. Husband is a very patient man!

Lock the doors turn off the lights and hide in the back room.

We carve pumpkins and usually do some Halloween painting and stick up our spooky pictures. We decorate the downstairs of the house, I have some great Halloween lights, windows stickers, cobweb stuff, looks good!

And for past few years I've thrown a small Halloween party where our house is the gathering point for my friends' kids (and my kids' friends!) to go trick or treating. Have some food and treats, with mulled cider for the grown ups. Some spooky music and some apple bobbing = a great time for all!

We participated in a minor way (trick or treating) when the children were about 5 to 11 years old. We had a lit pumpkin on our doorstep for all those years but never got the opportunity to hand out sweets as we were out traipsing the streets ourselves . We don't get involved at all now - not since our dc left primary school. So, basically, absolutely no "traditions".

Thread title gas been changed from Halloween traditions to plans for Halloween.

Goodness. And changed again to Halloween Activity Ideas.

Our family tradition is to get all the kids in the family together, carve pumpkins and light them in the garden, then have a bonfire and cook sausages, toast and jam, and finally toast marshmallows on it. Also apple bobbing followed by fishing sweets out of flour with teeth, so everyone ends up looking like floury ghosts!

We play trick or treat with balloons.....
Tie four balloons vertically on a piece of string hung on the wall you can have as many or as few balloons as you want on each length of string...
I number the balloons and put the numbers in a hat (like a raffle) and then the kids have to pop the numbered balloons they pick out of the hat
Some balloons are filled with treats and some are filled with tricks
Best to use black balloons as the children can't see what's inside the balloons.
Fill some with flour salt,water,scraps of paper,etc and fill the other ones with some sweets,little prizes, anything really that you can put into balloons for a treat ...we normally do 20 balloons and it's really good fun for adults and children.
We've even hung the balloons on the garden fence saves the mess indoors.
Also we always do number apple bobbing ...so each apple has a number on it and then you take turns bobbing for the apples you then add the numbers up at the end of the game to see who wins a prize ...normally a Halloween type cupcake.
We fill plastic gloves up with sweets and tie them up by the wrist part with orange and black ribbon and decorate the gloves before filling with sweets so the children make spooky sweet hands.

Im having a little party for my Halloween mad DD, instead of apple bobbing im tying ring donuts to a rail and they have to eat them without using their hands. For decoration i have wrapped old jars in bandages and stuck googly eyes on with battery tealights inside.

We bake cupcakes and decorate them like pumpkins with white chocolate ganache with oramge food colour. Either just plain or then add decorations with dark.chocolate to look like carved pumpkins.

Make Mummy into a mummy was a good one. The kids had roll of toilet paper each and went to town.

It’s not the dead we need to fear

I buy a few packets of cheap glow-sticks and use sticky tape to stick a small bag of Haribo / lollly / fun size chocolate to each glow-stick. When it gets dark I snap the glow-sticks to make them glow and hide them out in the garden - I get the ones that you can make into loops so we can hang them off the trees etc. Then the kids go out with their buckets and do a hunt - sometimes there is a ‘trick’ taped to the glow stick, like a plastic spider or similar. The garden looks great with all the glow-sticks lighting it up and the kids get a bucket of sweets as well as some tricks mixed in - they love playing this game! This started during covid instead of proper trick or treating but we have continued to do it because the kids love it so much!

Witches fingers, puff pastry cut in strips cover with ketchup and grated cheese and an almond fingernail..bake in a hot oven for 15 mins or so, a firm favourite in this house

@Surreyclaire totally agree.
Another big commercial money-making festival.
Although I do keep some treats in store if children come trick or treating, don’t want to spoil someone else’s fun if they enjoy it.

My neighbour and I organise a disco in the village hall for all the children in the village. We do food, crafts, face painting etc then they all go trick or treating round the village and finish up in the pub.
It started as a way for new families to get to know each other after Covid but we decided to carry on as it has proved popular. It's a real feel good event

I'm so pissed
It's now nearly 2years since I've been left without installation in my loft since the re done my sons ceiling.

We love Halloween! Things we do in our house;
-pumpkin carving
-decorating the house
-Halloween baking (cakes, biscuit decorations)
-treasure hunt (instead of trick or treating)
-age appropriate scary movie!

I hate Halloween so draw all the curtains and lock the doors!

Baking. So many funny Halloween ideas out there. My kids like making spider cupcakes or marshmallow ghosts

A couple of rolls of loo paper - let the kids make mummies out of each other 👻

A trip to the pound shop for paper, decorations, sweets, masks, lights and decorate the house with a fun but not too scary theme, apple bobbing, pumpkin carving, and if our pumpkin is fresh enough roast it off with some peppers and garlic, add some chopped potato a stick of celery a bit of chilli powder, and make a all hallows soup 👻👻💀

Buy purple and green paper, and cut into 20cm lengths - a glue stick and some black felt tips and make some spooky paper chains - write words like Boo, Ha ha, witches hats and scary faces - then decorate your house - get some paper plates and make masks, decorating with glitter and pumpkin seeds

My kids have been so upset that I refuse to take them out trick or treating that we will be making peanut spider biscuits tonight.......but i do enjoy baking with them, love eating and we have run out of break time snacks.