green halloween |

A few posts back we talked about greening up your halloween costume and today, we’re talkin’ Halloween treats!

If you’re giving out treats at your house this year you might want to think about alternatives to the customary chocolate bars and hard candies. Many of the well known brands of candy aren’t always the best for those of us who eat it or the rest of the planet.

But, there are other ways to bestow a treat on all the dear Halloween tricksters who come to visit. If you’re looking for something different to give your visitors this Halloween, here are a few ideas to get you started.

Natural Candy

If you’d like to still give candy but want to avoid the colors, preservatives, ethical issues etc often found with the big brand treats, try natural and organic candy. Companies like Yummy Earth and Newman’s Own have made it their goal to offer candy that’s tasty but doesn’t contain all the extras you don’t want.

Art and School Supplies

Some cool pencils and erasers, a pack of crayons,stickers, a small note pad with a pen; All of these options can make a great Halloween treats for trick or treaters of any age. Plus, you get to encourage their creativity instead of your visitor’s sweet tooth.

Used Book Basket

I recently read about a woman who collected used children’s books and then, each Halloween, would put them all into a big basket and let each trick or treater choose his or her own book. She said at first she wasn’t sure how it would all go over but the neighborhood children look forward to her Halloween used book basket now each year with great excitement and love carefully selecting the book of their choice for their “treat”.

This is my favorite idea personally – because it’s green and affordable! After all, used books are just a dollar at Goodwill – often you can get them for $.50! Even boxes of used children’s books at yard sales and library book sales are usually quite cheap. Stash them away through the year or even go stock up now and give the gift or reading to your Halloween friends this year too.

Handmade Trinkets And Gifts

For any occasion, including Halloween, handmade gifts can be a fun and often quite green option. Homemade Halloween bracelets or pins, a special key chain, or other unique hand made gift could make any little ghoul or goblin’s evening and these treats don’t have to be candy oriented either.

I know if you think about it you can come up with the right way for you to give out your Halloween treats this year. Sometimes it’s just gotta be the standard Twix or Blow Pop but, if you can swing it, Greening up your Halloween treats can be fun for you, your trick or treaters, and the earth!

What are you giving out this year? Let us know below and share your ideas for Green Halloween Treats!

I was just writing about Halloween party ideas for a client and realized, I never really pay much attention to the environmentality (if that were even a word) of the holiday (I use that word loosely as well…since technically Halloween isn’t a national holiday). I started thinking about how if you go to a store, even the Good Will store; all the costumes are gone in the few short weeks before Halloween. Seriously, I have seen racks with only one or two costumes left and although we keep our costumes in our home for years to come both as hand me downs and dress up clothes, I never realized that other people actually throw those costumes away each year.

Yes, Yes! Call me naïve. I live in a bubble. What can I say! But seriously, when I read the following statement on another website I was totally floored:

“Green Halloween notes that if we could just swap out about half the costumes used each year, we’d help reduce annual landfill waste by 6,250 tons (the weight of 2500 midsize cars).”

So then I started thinking about all the big retailers and they must sell millions of Halloween costumes each and every year right. Why on earth would anyone throw away a perfectly good Halloween costume after just one use and even more to the point, why throw it away rather than pass it on. Perhaps it came into disrepair, but I am betting there is some natural mamma out there somewhere that could use it to create the best green Halloween costume of all.

This past Halloween, my daughter wore a witch’s costume that I wore over 20 years ago that my mother had made by hand. Her accessories included an incredibly heavy broom made entirely out of twigs and wood fashioned by her father, a purple apron made from some old fabric that I had left from the curtains of someone’s Volkswagen bus (that used to be my thing…making curtains that is) and a witches hat passed down from her second cousin in Florida about 4 years ago. OH! Can’t forget the sparkly purple spider ring that came from who knows where…maybe a gift from the library? And we put glow stick juice in Jello and poured it into some old spice jars and added dead bugs; classic witch material. Point is, it all came from pretty much right here in the home and she LOVED it!

But really that isn’t what I came to tell all of you about! In my discovery of the statement above I was intrigued by Green Halloween and went on a World Wide Web adventure to learn more. I wanted to share what I found about their great annual costume swap and hope that all of you will consider a green Halloween too! Enjoy, Swap and Be Scary!!

Tag Archives: green halloween

Ideas For Green Halloween Treats

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