Happy Halloween!

If you couldn't tell by the excessive amounts of pumpkins, ghosts and bats, Halloween is just around the corner. Halloween is one of my favourite times of the year because you can dress up as anything you want to be, and more importantly, you can eat as much candy as you want. I do understand that there are people out there who would much rather shut off all the lights and hide in their basement on halloween night, however, if you love halloween like me, or celebrate it because of your kids, this blog post is for you!

As we know, holidays require a lot of preparation and Halloween is no different. In this blog post you will find tips on how to prepare for the Halloween season, trick-or-treating organizing tips, as well as post-trick-or-treating hacks to ensure you stay on top of the halloween candy chaos. 

Pre-Halloween

Decorations

• If you haven't already done so, gather all of your current Halloween decorations together and go through each item and decide if it's worth keeping.

• Keep a separate box for items that are broken or items you don't think you're going to use. You will then be able to decorate with your preferred items or visualize what items you need to purchase.

• Decorate using your chosen items! If you don't end up using something, add it to the cardboard box of decorations you're donating/ throwing away.

Halloween Eve

Costumes

If you yourself are participating in Halloween, or you have kids that are, it's important to ensure you have every aspect of the Halloween costume secured before the big day. 

• I personally like to try on my costume and plan out what kind of makeup, hair and accessories I want to wear with it and get all of those things ready the night before.

• I then take a reference picture so I know how to replicate it the next day. 

• After, I like to lay everything out so I can see what's missing and to ensure a stress-free Halloween morning.

Breakfast & Snacks

When I was in elementary school Halloween class parties were the best. We got to watch Halloween movies, trick or treat to different classrooms and best of all, eat all the candy and sweets in sight.

• In order to prepare for the inevitable sugar rush that your kids may experience at school, my advice here would be to prepare a healthy and nutrient rich breakfast for your kids to eat before school.

• As well as have a healthy after school-snack prepared so you can ensure they'll get something decent in their bellies. 

Post-Trick-or-Treating

As a kid, one of my favourite things to do after trick-or-treating with my friends was to dump out and sort all of our candy into piles and then trade the ones we didn't want. My advice here would be to offer this as an incentive for your kids to get them motivated to organize their candy.

• Before you head out trick-or-treating clear a large space in your living room, basement, or wherever is convenient, so that when your kids come back they will have enough room to dump out and organize all the incoming candy. 

• When you finish trick-or-treating, tell your kids to dump out all of their candy and sort them into piles of similar candies.

• Once all the candy has been sorted into piles, you can then start the trading period. You can get create with this and set a time limit, or have a candy banker, etc.

• When this is all done, it’s now time to store the candy. A common method is to store similar items into ziplock bags or baskets to keep it organized and easily accessible. Make sure you store the candy properly in airtight containers or ziplocks to ensure they don’t go bad.

• PRO TIP: If you find you have a lot of chocolates, opt to freeze it! Chocolate can be frozen for up to 6 months and the trick is to wrap it tightly with freezer wrap or bags and acclimate slowly in the fridge before freezing.

Post-Halloween

• A few days after the Halloween chaos has subsided, set aside 2-3 hours to take down and declutter your decorations. After seeing all your current decorations displayed in your house for a few weeks, you'll know which ones are or aren't worth keeping for next year.

• When taking your decorations down, put them away in waterproof tubs. Add any broken, damaged or old decorations to that cardboard box you set aside at the beginning of the decorating process.

• When you've finished ‘un-decorating’, put the box of donations or trash into your car and drop them off the next time you're out. If you don't do this, you will just end up adding it all back to your roster of decorations and add to the clutter.  

• In terms of storage, most of us store all our holiday decorations with many other storage boxes in hard to access areas, so my advice here would be to store decorations in easily identifiable boxes by colour or by having large labels. This ensures you don’t waste time shuffling through different boxes and you know what box contains what so that next year is even more easy.

I hope these easy tricks help to keep this Halloween season as fun and organized as possible. 

Nikki