Halloween Decorating

12 10, 2020

4 Ideas for Celebrating Halloween during the Pandemic

By |2020-10-12T07:53:37-05:00October 12th, 2020|Make Me Think Monday|0 Comments

Our morning walks are getting spooky as neighbors began to decorate for Halloween.

This yard decoration is not my favorite.

Not a fan of spiders period. Especially giant eyed spiders surrounded by ghosts and blinking jack-o-lanterns.

The yard pictured below with a recreation of Washington Irving’s 1820 “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is more what I think of when I think of spooky and scary.

I love how the short story about a headless horseman who terrorizes the real-life village of Sleepy Hollow resurfaces at Halloween every year. It’s America’s first ghost story—and one of its scariest.

This doozy 2020 is scary enough on its own. Not sure we even need a Halloween this year, and I know the CDC will not be encouraging us to knock on random doors and share treats with strangers.

We don’t celebrate Halloween at our house. With only Buster and Finn around, it’s like a repeat of all the fireworks on the Fourth of July, too much noise.

But for those of you who do celebrate and need some social distancing ideas for this year, let me suggest four.

  1. Spooky meals

Plan a spooky dinner with things like spaghetti eyeballs, Jack o’ lantern quesadillas, witch’s hair pasta, Dead Man’s Finger hot dogs. Or a breakfast of Vampire doughnuts. Have everyone—mom and dad included—dress in costume!

Find more great ideas here and here

  1. A Candy Search or Scavenger Hunt

Like Easter egg hunts, hide individual pieces of candy around the house or yard and let the kids fill bags or plastic pumpkins with the bounty they find.

Or provide hints to follow for a spooky scavenger hunt to search for a pre-filled plastic pumpkin for each kid. Mom or Dad can hide and jump-scare older kids along the route.

  1. Spend an evening watching spooky movies

Turn the lights out and have plenty of popcorn and candy treats available. Movie choices are almost endless from tame (It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!) to terrifying (Annabelle) and lots in between (Hocus Pocus).

Find movie suggestions at Rotten Tomatoes or Good Housekeeping.

  1. Take a ride around the neighborhood and enjoy the Halloween displays.

If you neighborhood is like ours, it’ll be a scary ride.

Halloween won’t be the same this year, it’s true. Not much has been since COVID-19 arrived. But we can enjoy the seasons by finding new ways to approach what we’ve had to put aside for now.

30 10, 2017

Where did Halloween come from?

By |2017-10-05T10:20:13-05:00October 30th, 2017|Holidays|0 Comments

Halloween’s origin dates to The Celts, who lived 2,000 years ago in Ireland, United Kingdom, and France.

Celts believed the boundary between worlds of the living and the dead became blurred the night before their New Year, which is November 1st.

On October 31st they celebrated the festival of Samhain, lit bonfires, and wore costumes to ward off roaming ghosts.

In the eighth century Pope Gregory III designated November 1st as a time to honor all saints and martyrs and incorporated some Samhain traditions.

October 31st became All Hallows’ Eve and eventually Halloween, the secular, community-based events filled with craved pumpkins and trick-or-treat, that we celebrate today.

But why crave pumpkins?

An Irish myth about an old drunk called “Stingy Jack” is said to be the reason.

Can you guess why he was called stingy? Of course, because he never wanted to pay for his drinks.

Read the full story here or watch to the fun, spooky video below:

The Irish used turnips, rutabagas, gourds, potatoes and beets for their lights to keep Stingy Jack away and ward off evil spirits on All Hallow’s Eve. Pumpkins became the jack-o-lanterns when waves of Irish immigrants came to America to escape the Potato Famine. They quickly discovered that pumpkins were bigger and easier to carve out.

Oh, and one more tidbit of information about jack-o-lanterns. This advice comes from the antique dealer me, not the Irish storyteller. Be careful where you display your cleverly carved jack-o-lanterns. The base of a pumpkin can stay moist for days and will rot and stain wood or even marble. Put either foil or a dish with a raised edge under any pumpkins or gourds you display this fall. I’ve stained more than one old piece of furniture decorating for fall with gourds and tiny pumpkins.

Go to Top