We have a lot of fun with Halloween. Many aspects of the holiday have become family tradition, like going to the orchard to pick out pumpkins, navigate the hay maze, snack on kettle corn and apple cider, and donate ten bucks to charity so we can build our own scarecrow. The “scarecrow” is mostly put together by the kids, which we then dutifully display on our front porch. And then I pray someone will steal it.
We invite family over to carve pumpkins, which is my husband’s domain. The kids draw their own designs, which my husband transfers to the pumpkins and carves. We’ve had pumpkins with unicorns on them, pumpkins with bugs on them, and pumpkins with dinosaurs on them.
For costumes, we sometimes do homemade, and sometimes store-bought. It depends on what the kids want to be. My insect-obsessed son has been an earwig, a swallowtail butterfly, and a devil mantis. Luckily my mother-in-law can sew, and has done a nice job making those costumes. She’s made a lot of other costumes for the kids over the years. None of the kids has yet wanted to be something scary or gross, so they still look really cute when they’re all dressed up!
The street we live on isn’t good for trick-or-treating, so we pile into the car (that was difficult the year my son was an earwig and had big pincers attached to his butt) and drive to a nearby subdivision. Sometimes we’ll meet up with other families, and the kids trick-or-treat until their little legs get tired, or the candy buckets get too heavy for them. It’s a bit exhausting, but it’s so much fun to see what a kick the kids get out of the whole thing. I don’t even inspect their candy because, like @evelyns_pet_zebra pointed out so well, dangerous Halloween candy is nothing but an urban legend. OK, I take that back. I inspect the Twix and Kit-Kats very carefully and usually they fail inspection so I have to keep them.