I have to be honest, I never thought about this until I was going to make the decision on what costume I wanted to put on our first born (almost 1 year old). I knew I didn’t want to buy a costume at the store and I didn’t want to spend a ton of time making him a costume, so what was something that I could incorporate stuff he already had and stuff that we already had in the house that would be easy to make a costume out of? I was sort of at a loss…
That’s when it hit me, I have never been a fan of halloween, I do NOT like scary movies, or really anything slightly scary and I only remember trick or treating a couple times as a kid, but once I got old enough to pass out candy I wanted to stay home and do that. We lived out in the country, not super close to any neighborhoods so we had to drive to other neighborhoods where our friends lived to go trick or treating.
My husband and I had a long conversation about this, how he grew up, and then how we wanted to raise our family.
We really dug into that bible (you don’t have to go far, and it’s pretty common sense) to realize that halloween was not something we really wanted to “celebrate.”
We love fall, we love to do all of the fall activities and we want to share that with our children!
So we decided we’re not going to celebrate halloween and we are going to make it a fun fall family night instead!
We live out pretty far away from any neighborhoods so we don’t have to worry about anybody knocking on our door so I made a list of different ideas we can do instead of going trick or treating!
We decided our new family tradition is to make a fun fall day out of it!
- We will read our bibles in the morning to remind us of the wonderful season that God has given us!
- We will go to the apple orchard and the pumpkin patch and get some apples, pumpkins, lunch, and go on a hayride! (weather dependent)
- We will use our apples to make some homemade fall treats!
- We will carve/paint our pumpkins and make sure to give the guts to the chickens! (while the kids are little we cut the top off and let them pull all the insides out to feed to the chickens and then let them paint the outside)
- We will play games and make our yearly fall keepsake!
This won’t always fall on the actual day of halloween and in fact sometimes I think it’s better that it doesn’t. Basically ignoring halloween as a whole.
Reasons We Don’t Celebrate Halloween
The main reason is because it goes completely against christian values. Halloween is a satanic “holiday” and we don’t want to support that in anyway. Even the families that innocently let their kids dress up as disney princesses and spiderman it’s still celebrating the pure fact of halloween.
Luckily we started this with our first born before he was even 1 so we won’t have an issue switching over and telling our kids they can’t trick or treat anymore, but we will have to explain to our kids one day why some kids go trick or treating and why they don’t.
We have planned on raising our kids with the bible in hand and with strong Christian values so we hope this won’t be too difficult for them to understand. We also hope that we can make this so much more fun than trick or treating!
The second reason is that it allows for more quality family time! We value our family time so much, especially as the kids are hitting those initial milestones and growing so fast! This allows for a scheduled block of time that is known by everybody what we’re doing and why.
Another reason is that it is a great learning opportunity! Every year kids get older and understand things a little more and a little differently, so every year we get to teach the blessings of fall (every season at that) and understand the history behind halloween. It also a good opportunity to practice manners out in public and safety with knives (carving pumpkins & cutting apples) and to practice different skills with the different treat making and crafts we do.
I absolutely love our new fall tradition and I think it really highlights our values and teaches kids some great lessons!
