How We Do Halloween

Halloween can be pretty controversial in some circles. My family has done several different things with Halloween and because of my growing up experiences, coupled with what I've seen/heard other families do, I have a few thoughts on how I might want to do it with my own kids one day.

When my brothers and I were young, we dressed up and went Trick-or-Treating. But it wasn't quite that simple.

We always dressed as Bible characters or a theme from the Bible (e.g. an angel, a fisherman, a soldier, a lion). I was an angel for three or four years in a row :) Then, we printed out little sheets of paper that explained who we were and what it meant and we handed those out to every house we went to.

Back at home, the parent who was not out with us was handing out candy. Again, not just candy. No. We printed out a strip of paper with a Bible verse on it and taped a verse to EVERY. SINGLE. PIECE. OF. CANDY!!!! Our church also provided some tracts and we gave one to each kid.

We only went to a few houses in our neighborhood (the people we knew) but then we went to my grandparent's street and my grandpa took us trick-or-treating there. (The papers explaining our costumes went along).

It sounds like a lot of work and it was. But what other time of year do you have "the world" coming to your door? Or do you go to so many other doors? It was a once-a-year opportunity and my parents decided to run with it.

Of course, once we got home, the trading began. We swapped candies that we didn't like to get candy we did and all the extra that nobody liked either got eaten by our parents or Dad took it to work with him.

When I was about 11 or 12 I think, my parents suggested a new idea. What if we each picked three kinds of candy that we really liked and we went to a hotel for the night to swim and watch movies? That sounded fun to us since we never had time to swim in hotel pools when we went on vacation. We invited one of my best friends so it was like a sleepover on top of everything else! I think we only ended doing that a couple of years but it was fun.

Now, we still get three kinds of candy (or desserts of some kind) and watch movies, but we just stay home. The transitions have always made sense. It was getting really hard to find things for me to dress up as. We finally moved on from Bible characters to Christian figures because all the Bible women dress the same. (There was one unfortunate year where we went as Moses and the Ten Commandments). The whole deal was getting complicated and overwhelming for my parents. Then one year, the hotel wasn't going to work out for some reason so we stayed home but kept the rest of it. And here we are. It's fun and we get to watch movies together, which is a rare occurrence these days.

What did you do for Halloween as a kid? What do you do now or what do you plan to do with your own family one day?