How to Celebrate Halloween With Your Children

Do you know how to celebrate Halloween with your children? Sure, you dress up your child in costume, equip them with a bag to collect treats, accompany them around the neighborhood as they do the trick or treat thing – right?

This seems to be the way most of the people in my neighborhood celebrate with their offspring. It was also the way I thought we should experience this holiday as well, at first.

Allow me to explain how my daughter and I turned this holiday into a very special time for both of us and many of her classmates as well. We live in a very rural community and trick or treating involved visiting our friends by driving to every stop. We only went to the houses that were familiar to us, refraining from stopping at strangers so hopefully the treats would all be safe.

This plan worked fine, she more than filled her trick or treat bag and we had a lot of fun in the process. However, we had so much fun searching for the right costume, applying make-up, taking pictures, and then it was over in one night. We discovered that we wanted more.

We started when she was about 8 years old with a party for her and her classmates and held it at our house. All the kids dressed up, we served special treats, played games, and we made Halloween into a special time for them. Of course we had to follow tradition and scare the pants off of them as well.

We told ghost stories, using special effects to make it more realistic. We recruited parents and other adults to help. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed themselves and it turned into an annual event.

Every year we made sure that our children had something special to do for Halloween. It was not always just a party; we became very creative with our activities. One year we created a mystery theme and with the help of other family members conducted a quest for an escaped inmate from the local jail. We even talked one of the local deputies to play a part in our adventure.

We changed it up every year, and as the years went by our number of guests increased to involve all the kids in the class plus friends from other grades as well. The year that we built a haunted house from an old farmhouse really went over very well – referring to the ear-piercing screams and frantic attempts to escape our homemade monsters – as to our reason for success.

As the years went by and October 31st would get closer, everyone became eager and extremely curious as to what we would be doing for Halloween. We always kept it a secret, tried to appear mysterious as to what our plans would be for the current fright night.

Our attempts to make this holiday special for our children happened every year – we learned from the very beginning how much they looked forward to whatever we may have planned for them. There was one year, due to other commitments, we found ourselves approaching the end of October with nothing planned. We became frantic for a short period of time and realized we had to do something, we could not disappoint them.

I loaded them all up in about five different vehicles and took them to a local site that had created a frightening maze in a corn field. This particular outing was enjoyed just as much as if we had done it ourselves. The kids were together, just as they had always been in years past.

This is a very important point to my story – they were together. This is what my goal was for my daughter and her friends. To provide a safe, fun and supervised environment for them and the best part of all of our efforts is the memories we created.

Today my daughter is 22 years old, her friends have scattered, and on the occasion we do reunite the Halloweens we spent together are still the main topic of discussion. They all remember the good times, the scary parts, from when they were smaller and cried when there was a strange tapping on the wall, to when they were older and wanted to cry but didn’t. We carried this tradition all the way through their senior year at school and every one of them was there, every year.

These memories are precious and all of the time and effort it required on my part has proved to be some of the best times in my life. Currently, we are still carrying on our tradition by attempting the same process for nieces and nephews and I hope others are doing the same for the children in their lives. I promise, start this custom with your children, no matter what their age, and you will not be disappointed.

Needless to say, I love Halloween, and I love the idea that I have helped the now young adults in our community to gain a sense of how to have good clean fun in their life. I hope that I have provided you with an idea or two on how to celebrate Halloween with your children.

Are you searching for ideas for costumes or for items you can use for yard décor or decorations for your house? Visit Everything Halloween for tips on some popular ideas to decorate and much, much more.

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