Celebrating Halloween while remaining safer at home? Here are some ideas.
No-Risk or Low-Risk Halloween Fun
- Start the day with pumpkin spice coffee or make pumpkin pancakes for breakfast.
- Decorate your home inside and/or out with lights and spooky decorations.
- Plan a special Halloween dinner with a cheese fondue and pumpkin pie for dessert.
- Enter a virtual pumpkin carving contest.
- Play Halloween Bingo.
- Mail Halloween greeting cards and/or care packages to loved ones.
- Make Halloween crafts for kids.
- Do a Halloween word search.
- Read a Halloween story. This is one of my favorite ones.
- Make jack o’lanterns and invite your friends to share their jack o’lantern creations on Facebook, Padlet or Zoom. Or enter a pumpkin carving contest!
- Have an indoor (or outdoor) scavenger hunt with these free printables.
- Watch “Ernest Scared Stupid” (Eartha Kitt co-stars as well as his dog, Rim Shot)
- Leave a bowl of individually bagged candies outside your door for trick or treaters. Wash your hands for 20 seconds, minimum, before bagging candy.
- Bake Halloween cookies or a pumpkin pie or make caramel apples.
- Take a Fall walk; bring a camera.
- Star gaze after dark; the full moon is a blue moon on Halloween this year.
- Take a Spooky House car drive after dark.
- Read or listen to a scary story (for adults). Here are 20 you can read online from O Magazine.
- Decorate your table with black, orange and white candles and mini pumpkins, or similar decorations. And add some paper bats to the walls!
- Watch your favorite spooky movie (or a new one). To make it social, have a watch party.
- Color Halloween pictures (adult coloring).
- Light a pumpkin-scented candle.
- Turn out the lights and listen to a haunted house story.
- Celebrated Samhain.
Moderate Risk Activities
(outdoors, with social distancing and masks)
- Organize a neighborhood costume parade (with kids and/or dogs) with social distancing.
- Visit an outdoor pumpkin patch.
- Show a Halloween movie in your yard.
- Go to a drive through Halloween scary attraction.
- Take a cemetery tour or ghost tour.
- Visit a drive-in movie theater.
- Participate in a costumed fun-run.
- Wear a Halloween-themed face mask when in public.
- Set up a decorated table at the end of your driveway for trick or treaters to pick up candy with social distancing. This works best if you and your neighbors make it a planned effort. There are lots of ideas online for inspiration.
High Risk (not recommended)
- Door-to-door trick or treating.
- Not wearing masks.
- Indoor Halloween parties.
- Indoor Halloween houses.
- Visiting movie theaters, bars or restaurants.
- Screaming (spreads virus more than talking).
Autumn in Virginia 