I mentioned a few weeks ago that my family goes all out when it comes to dressing up for Halloween, and I’ve also always done a bit of decorating for Halloween. But this is the first year that we’ve had a fun family Halloween party — just our little family of four — and I think it’s the start of a new Halloween tradition!
With kids, you really don’t have to do much to get them excited. I’ve found that anytime I give an activity a theme, it’s instantly cooler. When it comes to holidays, the theme can be as easy as the holiday itself — so in this case, a Halloween-themed family party!
Our Halloween party had 4 parts:
Books
We recently started reading together for 20-30 minutes after naptime/quiet time each day, so on the day of our Halloween party, I planned to read only Halloween-type books! I grabbed five Halloween books from the library, all pulled from this list by Janssen Bradshaw.
Activity
Our family loves to play Just Dance on the Wii, and there are sooo many Halloween songs/dances for Just Dance! On a regular day, I’ll never choose a Halloween dance, but at Halloween time, it’s fun to pick them all!
We have an actual Wii and like seven different versions of Just Dance, but we rarely use our Wii anymore; instead we just search on YouTube for whatever we’re looking for. Using YouTube is especially convenient for an activity like this, where we wouldn’t want to be changing discs between every song. We simply searched “Just Dance Halloween” and quickly found several songs to dance to!
Dinner
I recently shared our family’s fall bucket list, and one item on the list was to have a spooky dinner. The spooky dinner idea was actually the springboard for the whole Halloween party! For our spooky dinner, we had
Spaghetti & eyeballs (or hair & eyeballs, if you want to make it even creepier!)
Breadstick bones
Jack-O-Lantern veggies
Zombie teeth
Gummy worms
I also decked out the table with a spider web table cloth, lots of candles, ghost napkins, and Halloween goblets (from the dollar store!).
Movie
We already do a family movie night every Monday, so this time we just chose a Halloween movie! Russ tried to pick a tame one (2021 Under Wraps), but our 5-year-old is a pretty fearful movie watcher (we only JUST got back to our movie night after a 3-month break, since she ended up in tears over any movie we chose), so we had to stop the movie halfway through. Maybe next year the movie portion will go better!
Like I mentioned before, it doesn’t take much to get kids excited. There were definitely aspects of our little party that I went all out on (specifically the table decor and spooky dinner foods), but that’s because I like to do that! Kids don’t need all of that for it to be an exciting party. You can scale back as much as you need to in order to make it a simple-but-fun family party. Your kids will just love the chance to be with you doing things that are a little bit out of the ordinary :)
What would you do for a family Halloween party?