Halloween???
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| Sun, 10-02-2005 - 1:46pm |
Ok, so you can't avoid it...Halloween is here, at least it is in Retail-land. The grocery store I go to is all decked out with orange and black, the candy and costumes are the features of the special sales aisle, and there are hunderds of pumpkins in front of the store, too.
What are you doing for Halloween? How much money are you going to spend on it? Does being in debt now influence what you will be doing? Are you giving out candy or keeping your doors locked? Are you buying for Halloween now, or are you going to wait? Is Halloween a sore subject in your house right now because of the debt?
If you aren't ready to think about this coming Halloween, perhaps you can share a funny story or your favorite Halloween "trick" or "treat" from your past.
Boo! Littlesbigs

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Well we try to still live even though we are in debt. My husband is going on a fishing trip with the guys this coming weekend. We will probably do a haunted house with some friends for the following weekend. (getting a babysitter of course)and trick or treating Halloween weekend.
My daughter already has her costume, she is going to be a frog. Costume was bought at Old Navy for $15. So all I have to do is buy a few bags of candy for the neighborhood kids. We don't have many since its an older neighborhood.
But to answer your original answer we are still doing Halloween even though we are in debt. We paid off about $6-$7k since June, so we can splurge a little.
Shannon
We did a pumpkin patch with MOMS club last night. That will big our big expense ($14 for 3 of us OUCH!). Ian has a lion costume bought 1/2 price last year and Natalya can be a tiger with a costume bought at a garage sale. I'll buy a pumpkin right before and a bag of candy (not many trick or treaters here). If I didn't have the debt I would like to decorate the house a little more (some corn shocks, mums in the planters, more than 1 pumpkin).
Taleyna
I'm actually happy about Halloween this year because I'm going to use it as a way of advertising by giving a treat to the parents of the first 10 trick-or-treaters (it's usually preschoolers & usually several people I know so I won't feel super pushy!)...except that will cost me a bit of money but I think it will be fun too.
Other than that, I do need to get the boys costumes - Carolyn is going to be Minnie Mouse (although we ended up having to buy 2 costumes with that!!! GRRRR - The first one we bought got stolen while we were at the mall!!
Becky
CL of 4th, 5th & 6th grade Scoliosis
Well... Halloween is my favorite, and I start planning the day after Halloween for the next one. I hit all the after-halloween sales to stock up on decorations and other things for the next season.
This year, for trick-or-treating, we've finally given up the candy habit. The Oriental Trading company has tons of cheap, affordable alternatives, from pencil erasers in cute halloween shapes, to creepy slinkies, glow-in-the-dark balls, and plastic creepy crawlers, stickers, you name it. For $30 including shipping, we've ordered enough non-candy goodies to treat at least 300 children (we don't expect that many, but last year we ran out of candy, so we don't want to repeat that), with each child getting about two small toys.
For our sons, the youngest will wear costumes that we already have and the oldest will wear either a dragon costume that I selected on the sly for him, or a white rabbit costume that I started for him last year and never finished because he had decided to be spiderman (with a shirt that he already had) instead.
Our children have quite a wardrobe of costumes for daily dress-up play, because I look for costumes at yard sales and pick them up for no more than a dollar or (for a really exceptional costume) two apiece. They can choose from one of those costumes if they prefer, but I've made sure this year that the four-year-old will have something new to wear (the 18-month-old won't care that it's something he's worn before).
One thing I want to do, but haven't had a chance, is to make luminarias out of coffee cans. We don't drink coffee and I have yet to obtain a good supply of these. But if you drill holes in patterns on them and place a tea candle in them, they make beautiful, sturdy, nearly free luminarias, far superior to those paper bag thingies.
I'm excited about Halloween and can hardly wait. This is also the perfect season for hay rides (there's a corn maze not too far from here that offers free hay rides to and from the corn field, and you don't have to go into (and therefore pay for) the maze if you don't want to--you can just ride back and forth as much as you like, which is exactly what our four-year-old likes to do--we buy a cup of cocoa, just so we don't feel like complete mooches, but it's very inexpensive seasonal entertainment).
I love this season!! Last year we had a great Samhain celebration with friends, and had a ceremony to honor our ancestors as well as friends who had passed on. It was beautiful and magical, and I wish we were doing it again this year, but it's just not going to happen. Much better than trick-or-treating (although we did that, too! LOL).
Great question,
Heather
I never seem to be home on Halloween.
All my best,
Danni
This year, we decided to skip the expensive pumpkin patches near our home, and buy our pumpkins at our local Lowes store. They had jumbo pumpkins that would normally cost around $35-40 at our local pumpkin patch for only $6.97 each.
I purchased my son's costume at Walmart (Evil Wizard), but rather than buying a make-up kit, I'm just going to use my make-up to do his face for trick-or-treating.
For treats, I went to my local dollar store and purchased bags of toys, the kind you'd give for party favors (pinball, get-the-ball-in-the-hole, puzzle tiles, etc, and I'm using those for treats. I figure the older kids will enjoy them, and the younger ones, whose parents would rather them not have sweets, will be happy too. :-D
I would love to do some sort of yard decoration, but I don't want to spend the money at the store. Does anyone have ideas for inexpensive homemade decorations for the front porch or yard?
Thanks!
Pat :-D
Same here, Danni!
Unicef donations were being done in our neighborhood last year. I did't know anything about it, and was suprised the first time a child held a cardboard unicef box up to me at the door. All I had was candy! So after that child, I told Dh, "Just grab our jar of change in case there are others", and sure enough, there were.
Pat
The only one I can think of is flying ghosts in your tree!
Becky
CL of 4th, 5th & 6th grade Scoliosis
I'm so excited about Halloween this year! My son will be 9 1/2 months old, so it's my first halloween as a mommy! I got his costume for $7. It's Tigger, and it's one of the best costumes I've seen, and for so cheap, because it was secondhand. I haven't bought a costume for my foster son, because I don't know if he'll be here for Halloween. I'm going to pick one up this week, and make sure it's from somewhere like WalMart, so if he leaves before the 31st, I can return it. I really don't want to spend $$$ if the costume won't be worn. We're going to my parents' house on Halloween evening, so I don't have to buy candy. We're going to buy and carve some pumpkins, because I want to have that experience with Sam. I think we're going to take him to the pumpkin patch and choose a pumpkin and an apple (right next to the apple orchard) and have a hay ride. For the rest of our pumpkins (we may buy 3 because there are 3 of us), I'm going to buy them at the grocery store.
DOes anyone know if 10cents/pound is good for pumpkins? I'm really new at this.
Thanks for the ghost ideas! :-D I think my son would love to see little white ghosts blowing around in our trees. LOL! :-D
Pat :-D
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