‘I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.’

– Anne, Anne of Green Gables

Like a lot of families this year, we are feeling the cost of living crisis even harder now it’s autumn. With prices shooting up and income going down, trying to manage keeping 7 children with everything they need hasn’t left much room for non-essentials.

This was always going to be particularly tricky around certain times of year, such as Halloween… Our children absolutely LOVE Halloween, celebrating everything spooky for some reason is the biggest highlight of the year for them, only beaten by Christmas!

This year there was definitely no budget for pumpkin picking or other days out. The pumpkins we had planted at home earlier in the year also turned out to be too small to carve.

But despite the shoestring budget, we had a really fantastic day in the end – probably our best ever! This is what we did…

Everyone started the day watching a Halloween movie while I prepped lunch. I found a couple of bags of pumpkin flesh in the freezer from last year and so made my famous Thai Pumpkin Soup. It really is famous in our house as the children LOVE it!

Then we spent the afternoon getting the spooky clothes & costumes out, so everyone could choose what to wear. Nothing new was bought this year, we just worked through the stash! I always keep Halloween clothing to pass down, so there was lots to choose from.

I also found a face painting kit from a previous year, and as Willow was keen to practise her skills, she set up a face painting table and did each of the little ones faces.

Dinner was something we don’t have very often – hotdogs! I’m not keen on the nutritional content but as we’d had a healthy lunch I figured it balanced out for one day! These frankfurter type sausages are great to carve & add ketchup, to make them look like bloodied fingers for a fun & cheap dinner!

Then it was onto the fun of the evening….

We live in the middle of nowhere, so don’t have neighbours really, which makes Trick & Treating impossible. The little ones are always desperate to go, so this year I organised the next best thing – a Spooky Walk!

I had collected a dozen loo rolls and bought a packet of glow sticks, to make spooky eyes for our spooky walk. I then arranged the eyes around the garden as two separate trails, with Willow & Oren in costume at the two end points with a basket of sweets each, for the little ones to collect for their Halloween buckets (also saved from previous years).

It was dark by this point, so getting any good photos was impossible – but the eyes were very effective! On my instagram feed I have a reel from that night which shows everything much better if you are interested!

Willow was dressed as a witch, so nothing a too scary… but the only Halloween costume we could find to fit Oren was an old mask – in the dark it was pretty terrifying!!! We did it carefully though and the little ones knew it was Oren because of his hoody!

Then it was back indoors for our family Halloween party – like the pumpkin soup this is a bit of a tradition of ours.

We had picked up a couple of cheap decorations, which we’ve put away to use next year again.

And we collected the spooky eyes from outdoors and stick them up around the room, to get the most use from them.

Then it was onto party games! We had musical statues with some suitably spooky music.

There were two rounds of beanbag toss – Heath & Willow were particularly skilled at this one!

And then the wooden spoon races – with a spider instead of an egg. The three youngest did the course with the spoon in their hand, the four older ones had to carry it in their mouths – this was hilarious as it was most unexpected as to who was the most/least coordinated!

Then it was time to chill out, eat some treats and of course suffer me insisting on some photos!

Once the younger ones were in bed, we put on a spooky film for Oren & Willow to watch with us. Dean isn’t keen on horror films, so we went for the rather tame Blair Witch Project!

The children thought it was one of the best Hallowe’ens ever! And actually so did I! It was really chilled and loads of fun. I already predict that next year there will be requests to repeat some of this year’s activities… so I’ve put everything safely away to be used again.