3 Sensible Halloween Tips

We hear a gazillion how-to-green your Halloween Tips this time of year, but honestly, most of the good old Halloween Habits are here to stay. I’m already spotting orange flashing lights in every other yard in our neighborhood, and one guy down the street (he’s actually an amazing healer/body worker), surprisingly has a veritable graveyard in front of his house: a tomb that opens with smoke billowing out of it and a two-headed baby eating bones! Not my thing granted – but he’s clearly having fun!

Lola would never forgive me if I told her she could only eat homemade organic candy, or that we could only have Halloween decorations in our yard if the plastic was made from corn or recycled water bottles. To my horror, she’s fallen in love with a costume she saw in the window of a pop-up store, which is clearly made of petroleum-derived fake fur, and some very unpleasant polyester fabric – hemp clearly won’t do it for her this year!

So what are 3 things that we can do with our kids that will make our Halloween a little more eco-friendly, without being party-poopers?

1. Sign up with Terracycle

Until recently, candy wrappers have not been recyclable, but now some of them are – a big YAH for the amazing Terracyle. Go to their website and sign-up for the candy wrapper brigade. Get your kids to collect as many of the designated Candy wrappers that they can, and then you can send them back to Terracycle (they pay shipping), where they’ll get recycled into cool products. The kicker is that you can make money for your school or favorite charity too – win/win.

2. Conscious Candy

Rather than just reaching for the largest/cheapest bulk bag of candy you can find, you can make a better choice: You can either make sure you pick out candy that has a wrapper that Terracycle (above) will be able to recycle (Mars). You can also visit The Natural Candy Store and buy a huge bag of fantastic eco-candy to hand out. This store also carries a dizzying variety of organic candy, which will tantalize event the most hard-core candy afficionado! Make some brittle or fudge with your kids – it’s a great way of to teach them cooking/chemistry basics.

3. Costumes

For those of us whose kids don’t want to do the homemade costume thing this year, it’s important that we think about what will happen to that store-bought costume when Halloween is over. Your kid clearly won’t want to wear it next year, so unless there are younger siblings who may want to use it later down the line, ask your child to really take care of their costume: Keep the bag it came in and the day after Halloween, have your child carefully re-package it, explaining that another child might love to use it next year if it’s in good shape. You can then either take it to a thrift store or gift it to another family. You’d be surprised how many costumes get dumped in the trashcan.