31 Days of Family Fun: Halloween Fun

Holidays always bring plenty of opportunities for family fun and if your city is anything like mine, Halloween seems to have more than any!  Some of the activities we’ve enjoyed are:

~ A trip to the pumpkin patch – often the pumpkin patches around here include rides on hay wagons, corn mazes, and other fun activities.  The one pictured above even allowed you to make and take home your own scarecrow!  Of course, after the fun of the pumpkin patch, then you get to go home and carve a Jack O’Lantern.

~ Depending of course on age appropriateness, there are always the various haunted house type activities to go to.  In my area, we have haunted corn mazes, haunted houses, a haunted hayride through the Pioneer Village, and a ghost walk through downtown London.  As seen in my other post today, you could also take part in the zombie walk.  Travel to Toronto and you can go to Canada’s Wonderland, all decked out for the season!  Check around your town and see what spooky activities are available.

~ If your children are too young for the spooky stuff or if that’s not your cup of tea, there are generally Halloween activities that are more on the fun, lighthearted side available too.  Our parks and recreation department usually puts on some special days that include things like Halloween story times, costume parades,  and trick or treating (during the day) at Storybook Gardens.  Many churches in the area have “harvest themed” activities.

~ Have fun decorating your home.  Ok ok, you don’t have to do an all out light and music show as seen above but my daughter always got a kick out of gathering items from around the house and finding ways to turn them into something spooky….like making ghosts out of our old white sheets or witches crashing into trees from black garbage bags.  At one time, we had an informal little competition of sorts with our next door neighbours – we would each create funny tombstones to put in our front yards using the names of people we knew from around town (including each other) and having their manner of expiry relating to something personal to them.  For example, one year they had me drowning in fallen leaves because it seemed like the leaves from both of my neighbours’ trees always landed in my yard and I’d no sooner have them raked up than my yard would be completely covered again.

~ Read some Halloween stories like A Dark Dark Tale by Ruth Brown or Scary Scary Halloween by Jan Brett and Eve Bunting, The Little Old Lady Who Wasn’t Afraid of Anything by Linda Williams and Megan Lloyd to name a few.

~ Watch some Halloween movies.  When my daughter was a bit older she really liked Halloweentown I and II with Debbie Reynolds, Casper,  and Hocus Pocus with Bette Midler.  When she was younger, she liked It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown and Dr. Seuss’ It’s Grinch Night.

~ Make some Halloween crafts.  Ideas are all over the internet for Halloween crafts children can make but we also liked to just pull out the paints, crayons, toilet paper rolls, egg cartons, paper bags, cardboard and other things we had around the house and see what we could come up with.

~ Make some fun Halloween foods – not just sweet treats, but foods for every meal of the day!  Pictured above is a little witch that I whipped up at my show last night.  Full instructions are available on the replay of my show:  Link here – http://www.linqto.com/PlaybackRoom.aspx?roomname=creativeedventures&name=SingleExplicit_2011_10_24_19_59_57_925  and if you head on over to my cooking blog, all week long I’ll be posting recipes and tutorials for some other Halloween foods (yesterday’s offering – “Feet”loaf!) – http://islandtearoom.wordpress.com  I also have a blog that is solely for sharing Halloween and otherwise creepy themed foods called Grizelda the Ghastly Gourmet here – http://grizeldas.wordpress.com/  Be warned though – some of the foods there are NOT for the faint of heart!

Do you celebrate Halloween with your family?  What kinds of things do you do?

This blog post is part of a month long series.  It’s a blog hop of sorts – many different bloggers are taking part, presenting a variety of topics in a 31 day series.

To check out the other participants in this, go here:

http://www.thenester.com/2011/09/31-days-participants.html

To catch up on the previous posts in my series, 31 Days of Family Fun, go here:

http://cynchronicity.wordpress.com/2011/10/01/31-days-of-family-fun-the-basics/

While you’re here, if you like what you see, I’d love for you to become a follower/subscriber of my blog!