Celebrate Halloween as a family with family costumes, homemade candy and treats, and easy, spooky decorations the kids can easily make.
It’s time to get started, especially if you’re going to make some of the costumes, candy, and decorations from scratch and you should. Kids can learn to put a hem in, cut-out paper ghosts, and measure cupfuls of sugar. They’ll be using math, improving their hand-eye coordination, and having such a great time they won’t realize they’re learning.
Creative Family Costumes
Since it is an election year the stores will be full of political costumes and, for many people, nothing is scarier than a family of politicians.
Some ideas: Everyone in Hawaiian luau costumes with grass skirts in honor of Barack Obama’s home state? Or all the aunts in Hillary Clinton rainbow-colored pant suits? Or the baby in a Cindy McCain wig? Halloween is the one time of year when it’s important to be completely irreverent – and to overdose on candy.
Once the family’s decided on a theme – politicians, zombies, bumblebees, wizards, witches, pumpkins – then look for costumes. Easy patterns, including a cute family of penguins can be found at Simplicity.com.
If you don’t sew, there are loads of ready-made, group costumes at Halloween Express, Target, Wal-Mart, and CVS. A closet raid at Grandma’s might reveal 70s-style tracksuits, muu’muus and who knows what other gems. Be creative and open-minded and the costumes will come.
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