Here are a few ideas to get you started. Pick one or two so you can enjoy yourself without feeling overwhelmed. You can pare them back and make them as simple as you want. The point is connection, not emulating Martha Stewart (who has a staff and no kids at home). As long as there's laughter and hugs, you're on the right track.
- Work with your child to design and create a costume.
- Have a Halloween Candy Hunt in your darkened home with flashlights or glow sticks.
- Carve Pumpkins.
- Work with your child to make a Halloween playlist.
- Bob for Apples.
- Work together to make a simple haunted house in a room in your home, with glow-in-the-dark spider decals, eyeballs and worms in a bowl (peeled grapes and spaghetti), toilet paper wrapped mummies, ghosts made of sheets.
- Record a "spooky" outgoing message on your voicemail with your child.
- Bake pumpkin bread together.
- Decorate your home or yard together.
- Work with your child to create a creepy zoom background.
- Make Creepy Crawly Cups together: Put gummy worms in small clear cups and pour in Jello.
- Have a live or virtual costume parade with friends, neighbors and extended family.
- Make glow-in-the-dark slime.
- Play Halloween bingo.
- Play pin-the-face-on-the-pumpkin.
- Tie donuts to a string at mouth level, and have a donut-eating race.
- Host a Halloween costume party for your child and their friends, with Halloween-themed food and activities.
- Light candles and tell scary stories in the dark.
- Have a Halloween pinata.
- Snuggle up for a Family Spooky Movie Night.
As your child grows, you'll start to see them taking the lead in creating fun holiday traditions with their friends. But if you host the party at your house each year, it becomes a special tradition they all look forward to. Over time, your home becomes the go-to gathering place. You'll love capturing photos of the kids in their costumes year after year, watching them grow, keeping the memories. And your kids and their friends will treasure looking back at those moments as they get older!
