Want to be the destination spot for all the little ghouls and goblins in the neighborhood?! Here’s our tips on how to have the best Halloween house on the block. The top three elements – “good” candy, a projector to play Halloween-themed movies, and participate in the Teal Pumpkin Project. (It doesn’t hurt to have a super cute dog dressed in a costume as well!)
When our daughter was little and we had first moved to Cincinnati, we were in an apartment. Luckily for us, one of her best little friends had grandparents in a great older Oakley neighborhood that was the BEST at the time for trick-or-treating. There were just blocks and blocks of fun houses, great candy, and a couple super spooky haunted houses. The Oakley fire department would even roll through to get pictures with the kids and pass out candy. We have some of our greatest family memories from there.
Even better, there wasn’t just candy back in those days. Some houses would be grilling hot dogs to pass out or have beer and wine coolers as “treats” for the parents. My husband doesn’t drink, but the rest of us adults would all grab a cold one (even while we froze or often got rained on!) and have even more fun walking the neighborhood with our little witches and superheroes.
When the girls got older, Aria’s grandparents retired and moved to a smaller place in Northern Kentucky, and we ended up finding a house to rent near where we’d been living in Pleasant Ridge and had a couple pretty fun Halloweens on our own. When we bought our dream home in Mt. Washington during the pandemic, we finally found our holiday-loving people and were officially a part of the spooky festivities we’d only been guests of in the past.
Our neighborhood is almost all cul-de-sacs and dead ends, which means there’s hardly any through traffic and you can wind your way from house-to-house and eventually get back to your own home without having to waste any steps. Plus, we have our own haunted house, The Haunt of 1216, that they do an AMAZING job of every year! It’s completely free (but donations are welcome!), and you should definitely bring your family by to go through it one of the Fridays or Saturdays in October this year.
THE “GOOD” CANDY
Now, candy can get expensive! But, you can find ways to save and still get the good stuff. By the end of August, all the stores usually already have Halloween candy out. The bags will definitely still be good until October 31st, so grab as many as you can (or need) as soon as you spot good sales or find some e-coupons. We like to get some bulk bags at Costco and Sam’s Club as well as check out Aldi’s pricing when stores like Kroger, Meijer, or Wal-Mart don’t have sales going on right at the moment we’re shopping.
We always recommend getting both chocolate and candy variety bags. Mixtures of all the most popular candy bars and then the Skittles/Starburst/etc. combinations are the best. We always enforce the “one piece per kid” rule at first but we also always tell them to come back around right towards the end for more if we have leftovers. The kids that come back at the end usually get to take huge handfuls back home with them, and we love seeing their delighted faces.
Now we don’t do this, but if you can afford it – get full-sized candy bars and Skittles to hand out. The kids go CRAZY over the “rich” houses that can do this! Regardless of how much or what kind of treats you pass out, we all know our kids come home with more than enough candy to last them weeks (or months!), so everyone wins in the end. The important thing is to just have FUN!!!
HAVING A MOVIE PROJECTOR
The one I used last year I’ve had for a couple years is great, but I did buy an upgraded projector during a holiday sale that I’ll use this year! Since we have a white garage door, I just projected directly onto that. As the evening went on and the skies got darker, you could see the movies better and better. Last year, we played the original Hocus Pocus first and then It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.
Our neighbors on our cul-de-sac told us how much they loved being able to sit in their driveways and watch the movies we projected while everyone passed out candy. The kids that came up loved it too! It’s definitely going to be a continuing tradition for us!!! There are a lot of Beetlejuice fans, so I’m planning on playing that one for sure this year.
Another good tip for not only successful but also enjoyable Halloweens in Cincinnati is to have some sort of fire pit/portable fireplace (of course, always exercise caution and fire safety!) with you as our Halloween nights tend by cold! I found a great propane fireplace on sale at Costco just before last year’s All Hollow’s Eve, which classed it up and kept us warm. Several of our neighbors brought their metal fire pits from their backyards to their driveways, and the ambiance on our little street was even better for it.
TEAL PUMPKIN PROJECT
The Teal Pumpkin Project is a nationwide initiative dedicated to making Halloween safe and fun for all kids. Fellow mom, Becky Basalone, had a child with severe food allergies, which made enjoying traditional trick-or-treating REALLY hard. Setting out non-food or allergy-friendly treats in a separate bowl and marking your house/table with some form of a teal pumpkin is all it takes to participate!
The retail world has been a huge support of this cause for several years now – it’s so easy to go almost anywhere during Fall and find some sort of teal pumpkin decoration. You can even paint your own real pumpkin in teal with the kids or print off a pumpkin coloring page and color it in teal with the kiddos.
I like to set out our big teal mixing bowl and set a little plush teal pumpkin in front of it on the opposite side of our table from the regular candy bowl. I usually include stickers, glow sticks, playdough, and organic fruit rolls like from BEAR or Annie’s. The stickers seemed to be way more of a hit than I thought they would, especially when the kids discovered they were able to take a whole sheet with them and not just one single sticker. What else do/would you put in your bowl?!
