Are you celebrating an eco friendly Halloween at home this year? Growing up, Halloween wasn’t a holiday my family celebrated often. Days before Halloween we would stock up on our favorite candy and pick out our favorite Halloween movies. On Halloween day we’d have a delicious dinner and eat candy and watch Halloween movies as a family.
It was a bit untraditional, but it was our tradition. If you’re thinking about spending Halloween at home, this post is for you!
This post is all about 9 ways to celebrate an eco-friendly Halloween at home:
1. Thrift Costumes/Clothing and Create Costume Stations
Even though we’re spending Halloween at home, we’re still dressing up! Not only do we need pictures for Instagram (ha!), but we also want memories. To take a more eco friendly Halloween approach, we plan to thrift the costumes for the kids. Each year, Americans spend billions of dollars on Halloween costumes. To put this in perspective, it is estimated that the average person celebrating Halloween spends about $80 – $90! Thrifting, on the other hand, is significantly cheaper. This is a great example of how purchasing sustainably can actually save you money.
If you’re thinking about thrifting costumes for your kids, start early! If you’ve ever been thrifting before, you know it takes time and patience. Starting early is key to ensuring you get the best picks available!
If you can’t thrift your entire Halloween costume, are there accessories you can find at the thrift store? Sometimes these finishing touches are what sets your costume apart from others. Instead of overpaying at the nearest Halloween costume shop, check your local thrift store!
Benefits of thrifting
- Reuses items instead of wasting them
- Saves raw materials needed to create more items such as fossil fuels for energy and water
- Cheaper
- Find unique items
- Rejects wasteful fast fashion trends
If you’re crafty, try sewing a costume! My sewing ability peaks at patching holes, but creating your own costume – especially from old materials is an amazing way to celebrate an eco friendly Halloween at home.
Makeup/Costume Station
Set up a makeup and costume station! Use different props, accessories, fabrics, makeup essentials and clothing pieces and see what your child creates! This is perfect for both older and younger kids.
In addition to the creation station, you can encourage younger kids to engage in pretend play. Pretend play or imaginative play is a great way to practice thinking skills for kids from the age of 10 months to about 12 years old! To initiate pretend play, begin to explore the question “what if?”. Allow your child to be creative and think outside the box. Use accessories, props, and even imaginative objects!
2. Cook With Your Kids
Have an eco friendly Halloween at home by cooking with your kids! I love cooking with my son. Cooking with your kids is beneficial for their health and gives them an opportunity to learn where food comes from. Holidays are such a special time to spend in the kitchen with your kids, especially if you are celebrating them at home!
Halloween Recipe Ideas to Celebrate Halloween At Home
- Try these Spider Cupcakes! Instead of single-use paper cupcake liners, this year we are using silicone reusable cupcake liners.
2. Try these Mummy Dogs! These are so much fun to make with the Pillsbury crescents rolls.
3. Make these Dirt Cups! I usually make these for Earth Day, but they’re also a fun treat for Halloween and kids adore it!
4. Try these Halloween Stuffed Peppers! Stuffed peppers are already a must in my home. This is a great idea for dinner on Halloween if you plan to spend your Halloween at home. The recipe calls for elbow noodles, but spaghetti noodles work great too!
5. These Peanut Butter and Jelly Spiders are sure to be crowd-pleasers! They’re so simple to make and my kids adore them!
Cooking is an awesome way to cut down on the amount of candy you have to buy, but also a great way to have a sweet treat to celebrate Halloween. As we’ll talk about below, individual pieces of candy, wrapped in plastic can have some negative environmental impacts.
Here are a few other benefits of cooking with your child (source):
- Strengthens their fine motor skills
- Develop an understanding of math skills by measuring
- Learn the concept of sequencing by reading recipes
- Expand their vocabulary
In addition, cooking with your kids gives you the opportunity to teach them about the environment. They can learn about organic, green cookware, the importance of water, and discuss where ingredients come from. This gives them a deeper appreciation of what they’re eating and how it impacts the environment.
3. Play Halloween Games and Color Coloring Pages
Grab this Halloween Activity Bundle with 11 pages of Halloween fun! Print out this activity bundle and celebrate Halloween at home while engaging in some fun, and interactive games. You can make these games into a competition – who can finish faster? who can get the most answers correct?
This Halloween activity bundle requires creative thinking, and problem-solving, and also offers Halloween coloring book pages! Halloween is a holiday meant for enjoyment, and playing games is a great way to get into the spirit of the season. These Halloween activities for kids can help them embrace the spooky and whimsical aspects of Halloween.
For younger kids, try these adorable Halloween-themed counting cards!
4. Don’t Forget The Candy!
What’s Halloween without candy, right?! Even though we’re celebrating an eco friendly Halloween at home, there are still some eco-conscious candy choices available.
Try to buy unwrapped! If you’re celebrating an eco friendly Halloween at home, there’s nothing wrong with purchasing unwrapped candy. In fact, it makes snagging pieces of candy that much easier!
Believe it or not, candy wrappers are not recyclable. They often contain a mix of materials and are too small and light to be properly sorted at recycling centers. Recycling is often seen as the answer to offset some of our overconsumption habits, but it turns out recycling is a lot more complicated than we realized.
According to research, 47% of the United States population buys candy for Halloween! That’s almost half the U.S. population, as you can imagine, that is also a lot of plastic waste. Plastic is plaguing our oceans and even our diet! To decrease the amount of waste created by the large amount of candy we consume this holiday, try to buy candy that isn’t individually wrapped.
I will be honest in saying that organic candy is usually more expensive. If you’re celebrating at home, it may be more feasible to purchase this type of candy because it will be for your small family.
Try to buy in a box or foil! Plastic candy wrappers are not recyclable. If you’re looking to purchase individually wrapped candy, try buying candy in a box or foil so it is more easily recyclable! My favorite candy is a box are nerds! If you’re buying candy in foil, like Reese’s. Make sure to add the foil together to make a ball, then recycle the foil ball!
Try to buy organic! Until recently, I didn’t realize there was a true difference between organic candy versus not. Candy isn’t great for you anyway, right? Does it really matter if I purchase the best kind?
In short, the answer is yes. That difference is the quality of ingredients used. To be certified organic under the U.S. Department of Agriculture, products must not contain ingredients produced with pesticides, synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), or ionizing radiation (source). What we consume in our bodies always matters. It matters for our planet and for our health.
Please keep in mind that unfortunately, most organic candy does not come in eco friendly packaging.
What better way to celebrate an eco-friendly Halloween than with an eco-friendly piece of candy? It’s a win-win!
5. Don’t Waste Your Pumpkins
When celebrating an eco-friendly Halloween, we have to consider waste! We are not strangers to food waste in America. In fact, the United States Food and Drug Administration (USDA) states that 30-40% of our food supply is wasted. When we waste food we’re also wasting energy, water, and creating more greenhouse gases. More specifically, 1.3 billion pounds of pumpkins were trashed in 2014 (source).
Here are 5 ways to make sure you don’t waste your Halloween pumpkins:
- Cook with it
- Add it to dog food
- Toast the seeds
- Use it to make a face mask
- Compost it
6. Do a Litter Cleanup
The day after Halloween, take a walk around your block and do a litter cleanup. Maintain an eco friendly Halloween with a neighborhood free of litter.
Litter left on the ground almost always ends up in the ocean. If you haven’t already heard about our plastic problem, just know there will soon be more plastic than fish in our ocean. This is to say, we don’t need any more litter ending up in our ocean.
Every piece of litter picked up off the ground, is one less piece in the ocean.
7. Have a Bonfire
On my Instagram, I often talk about the benefits of spending time in nature. An awesome way to celebrate an eco friendly Halloween is spending time in nature with a bonfire!
Halloween is the perfect night for bonfires. Enjoy spending time outside in nature while cozying up to the fire to celebrate this holiday. Toast some smores’ and tell ghost stories to add some spoke to the event.
8. Have a Halloween Storytime
Have a Halloween-themed story time! If your kids love reading as much as mine, this Halloween at home idea is a no brainer!
First, grab this Halloween Storytime Pack for kids aged pre-k – 8th grade!
Next, grab these books that match the Storytime Pack:
- The Halloween Play, by Felicia Bond
- It’s Pumpkin Time by Zoe Hall
- Big Pumpkin, Erica Silverman
- There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Bat, Lucille Colandro
- There Was An Old Lady Who Wasn’t Afraid Of Anything, Linda Williams
- A personal favorite for my kids – Night of the Ghost Pirate, Paw Patrol
9. At Home Scavenger Hunt
These are so much fun! I’m offering this FREE Halloween Home Scavenger Hunt download. You can download it here!
Playing a Halloween scavenger hunt will at home excitement to your at-home Halloween celebration!
BONUS Ideas to Celebrate Halloween at Home
Here are some other, kid-friendly ideas for a fun and safe Halloween celebration at home:
Decorate your home
Try not to buy any new Halloween decorations this year! Each year, Americans spend $2.7 billion on Halloween decorations (source)!
Decreations created require raw materials to make. Extracting these raw materials is often the cause of our rapid increase in greenhouse gases, contributing to climate change. By refusing to buy new items and reusing items you already have, you’re making huge strides in celebrating an eco-friendly Christmas.
Here are some ideas for DIY Halloween decorations by reusing items you already have at home:
Check out this blog post for 48 Easy DIY Halloween Decorations!
Pumpkin decorating and carving
Decorating pumpkins is so much fun! We started this tradition last year and will definitely keep it going this year. Here are a few things to consider grabbing to decorate your pumpkin while celebrating an eco friendly Halloween:
Items for pumpkin decorations for kids:
- Stickers
- Markers
- Paint
- Paint brushes
- Lots of newspaper or an old sheet (to get paint on)
- Googly eyes
- Pipe cleaners
- Glitter
- Paper and glue
- Pom poms
Be sure to carve the pumpkin too! We love doing a combination of carving and decorating. If other family members are visiting, we hold a contest to choose the best pumpkin, based on different categories (funniest looking, most scary, etc.)
Leave a Reply