Ep 120: Simple Halloween Ideas for the Whole Family that Use Less Plastic
Who says Halloween has to be filled with plastic trinkets, decorations, and disposable costumes to be fun? Not me!
The sad fact is that on average, Americans buy $3.4 billion worth of costumes every year and most of those will be thrown out after just one use. In the UK, an estimated 2,000 tonnes of plastic waste is generated from throwaway Halloween costumes.
The decor that we collectively put up in our homes isn’t much better. Between Halloween and New Year’s, Americans throw away 25% more trash during the holiday season, which amounts to an extra 25 million tons of garbage. A significant portion of that comes from decorations.
We can do better.
Plus, when we are intentional about the items we use in our homes and to dress up, we can cut back on clutter, bring more attention to how we are celebrating, and enjoy it all a lot more.
This episode of Wannabe Minimalist will also help you discover:
6 ideas for getting costumes and decor (without buying new)
Non-plastic decoration ideas for both the inside and outside of your home
Simple costume ideas you can find in your closet
How to make costumes the easy and sustainable way
Several ideas for plastic free goodies for Trick or Treaters
Additional Links and Resources:
(some links may be affiliate links, which means I may get a small commission if you make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Thanks for supporting me!)
Paper Bats: http://marvelousmommy.com/2013/09/easy-diy-halloween-decor-wall-of-bats/
Mummy Pillow Idea: https://eighteen25.com/diy-mummy-pillow/
DIY Luminaries: https://jollymom.com/diy-halloween-tin-can/
Skeleton T-shirt Costume: https://blog.partydelights.co.uk/how-to-make-a-diy-skeleton-t-shirt/
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Transcript
You're listening to the Wannabe Minimalist Show with Deanna Yates, episode number 120. On today's episode, I'm exploring how we can have fun this Halloween season while still keeping things simple. There are ideas for simple decor both inside and outside your home. Easy costume ideas for the whole family, and a look at sustainable treat options as the holiday season gets kicked off. Let's look at ways that we can make this easier for ourselves, but still be full of fun and celebration.
Hey there, my wannabe minimalist friend. Welcome back to the show. We are winding down September this week and have fully headed into the fall. This is the time of year when we see that holiday decor kind of like explode everywhere.
Now I know it's been that way for a while, but I do my best to try to put on blinders until October. And now that October is almost here, I wanted to get a holiday post out there for you. I know I'm a little bit ahead of the ballgame for myself and my own home, but I wanna make sure that you have all the information you need so that you can be ready to tackle the holidays as they come.
But don't worry, we are just talking Halloween today.
Now in the US Halloween is a big deal and it actually seems to be getting bigger. Every year and he doesn't, everything, it all just seems to be kind of growing exponentially. So we're going to take some of that back and bring it back down to a reasonable level. Okay?
Of course, if Halloween is not your thing, you don't have to do anything for it perhaps. Go [00:01:30] ahead and stop this podcast now and come back and join me next week or go check out an older episode because today is all things Halloween and spooky and fun.
However, there are some simple ways that we can celebrate. So if this is your deal, we're gonna go ahead and talk about how we can still make it really great without going too big so that we can have those spooky festivities in our homes without the chaos and the stress that comes along with it.
But before we get there, I want to say a quick thank you for joining me.
If you are returning, I am so happy that you're back. And if you're new, well then welcome to the show. I am thrilled to have you here and I wanna take a minute to share the latest review that I received.
Lishy wrote, and I quote, “I just discovered, Wannabe Minimalist yesterday? And I'm hooked. I can't stop listening. Such a great vibe and I love the insights. I'm a mom of a two year old wild boy who has been seeking, trying to gain self love, but also working on minimalism, and I feel like this podcast hits all the marks. I promptly join the Facebook group, and I can't wait to keep learning and growing”.
well, Lishy, Thank you so much. I am thrilled to have you as a listener and as part of the Wannabe Minimalist Family on Facebook. I will do my best to bring you interesting information that can help you in your home and your life, whether that be decluttering, organizing, creating systems, or just keeping things simple like with today's episode.
Let's dive into it. When it comes to Halloween, I think there are three [00:03:00] major categories that we're talking about, and this is gonna be decor, costumes and treats, and we're going to explore ideas for each of these today.
As several of these are visual ideas, I do want to let you know that I will have lots of ideas over on my website, so if you want to get kind of that visual picture along with my audio descriptions, go ahead and head on over to wannabeclutterfree.com/120. Again, that's wannabe clutter free dot com slash the number one two zero. 120.
But before we get to the individual categories, I want to start off with some ideas, just kind of some overarching ideas that you can think about when we're gathering our things and when we're, bringing things into our home.
And keep this in mind as we're going into the other holidays as well. Okay.
The first thing I want to do is I want to challenge you to back away from the Dollar Tree. Now, yes, there can be some great deals there, and I am a sucker as much as anyone for a good Dollar Tree hack. I love watching those videos on YouTube.
I can get kind of drawn up in it, but I don't always bring that into my house. I don't actually follow through on doing those hacks and things like that. Because there are other ways that we can be festive without resorting to these one time use plastics or just kind of this kind of cheaper and junkier material.
I want us to try to stay away from that and if we are going to buy something new, I want it to be something that can withstand the test of time. Let's talk [00:04:30] about how we can , get these things. Well, one way is to make them, Now my daughter loves crafts, and so making Halloween decor and our costumes to an extent, we'll get to that in a minute, is a fun way for us to connect, spend some time together and to be festive.
Plus, we love looking around and seeing all of the creations in our home. It connects you to the place, the person that you worked with to make it, And then the memories of making those things, even if you make them by yourself, it's still, you have that little sense of pride. And I think that can help go a long way when we're talking about, making our homes feel like the places we want to be in.
The next thing you can do is to upcycle things from around your home. Now this is similar to making things, and we're gonna look at some specific examples. Taking a minute to look at your items. Maybe you're ready to declutter these things anyway, and you can experiment with them or turn them into something else.
If you were ready to let go of them, it kind of gives you that free reign to, think outside the box and do something silly or crazy. it gives us just a little bit of leeway to be a little bit more creative. And so this might be a good use for some item in your house.
Another way to be eco friendly this Halloween season is to ask your friends, Maybe they have an older child and you can share a costume from previous years, or they have some decor that they hadn't planned to use this year. Now, this can also be a great way to help your friend declutter as sometimes we just need a reason to part with something, right?
And then we know what's going to somebody that's going to use it and love it, and so it [00:06:00] makes it easier for us to part with it, or our friend in this case. Or maybe you have stuff that you can give to another friend as well. And then at the end of the season, you can either keep it to use again, you can pass it on to someone else. And so it's just a really great way to kind of reuse things.
Another way that you can get items for the season is to ask in your local by nothing group. Now, I am lucky. We have a super active group here and they've already been exchanging costumes for a few weeks already. I've seen it. And it's just a really nice way to be able to reuse and kind of recycle these costumes.
So if you haven't checked your area for a buy nothing group, I would really recommend it. They are through Facebook, so if you, if you have a Facebook account, you can look and it's buy Nothing group and they're very specific and they have very certain locations where they are. But I just wanna caution you to resist checking it all the time.
And I want you to try to give more to that group than you take, right? We're trying to declutter our spaces. So let's make sure that we just look there when we need something. Be very specific. You can ask for something in the group too. And that way you're just looking for the one specific thing that you need and not just kind of going, Oh, that looks cute, and trying to find a place to put things from the group.
Right? Okay. Just keep that in mind as you're going there cuz it can be really easy to get wrapped up in, in all the stuff that people are giving away. And then the final way I wanna suggest being more eco-friendly in our Halloween decor and costumes is to check your local thrift stores. Now these can be really great places to find authentic pieces [00:07:30] for more time period costumes.
Like say you're going for the seventies or the nineties or the fifties, going for those decade costumes. There can be lots of things there. And it's gonna be hit or miss, so you're just gonna have to kind of go and explore. But it's also great to repurpose things from. The thrift stores, like for your holiday decor, you can paint trays or you can spray paint jars.
And then you can also take it up a notch by when you go to the thrift store, take a box of stuff to drop off for donations at the same time. And that's a, kind of a win-win and you're getting rid of stuff and you're maybe finding a few pieces to bring in. Okay, now that we know where to find these things, instead of just running out to the store or pressing the Buy Now on button on Amazon, Let's look at the biggest of our three categories, and that's going to be decor.
Now, this will be the first year in a long time for our house, for us in particular that we've had a house with space to decorate. Outside especially. So I wanted to start with the outside decor, and it's overwhelming. Like when you first start looking and you go on Pinterest and you see all the things and you see all these like beautiful images, it's really overwhelming.
One of my favorite ways to keep it simple is to decorate with nature. And people talk about this a lot with winter and bringing in evergreens and bringing in Holly and things like that. You have to be careful cause I think Holly is poisonous to animals, but, you know, miseltoe and all those kinds of things.
So at the holidays or at Christmas time, but halloween is fantastic. You've got pumpkins and gourds. You can [00:09:00] decorate with orange flowers and you can use just branches. You can take those branches and you can spray paint them black to kind of have this Halloween vibe to them. And so I'm gonna be working with a lot of those items in my home as we decorate our front porch.
And I'm gonna be posting some inspiration photos on my website. But. I will be posting my actual photos on Instagram because I haven't quite gotten to all of the places. I've gotten to a few spots and done a few things in my home. But again, it's not quite October here, so as things get together, I will be posting them on Instagram.
Remember you can get the show notes@wannabeclutterfree.com slash 120, and I will post some inspiration photos there and then you can follow me on Instagram. I'm wanna be clutter free over. And so then another way to decorate outdoors is to, again, recycle or upcycle items, we've talked about this. You can make luminaries out of using cans like food cans, like black beans and corn and, and potatoes, sorry, tomatoes is what I meant to say.
And so you rinse them out, and then you can, hammer in a message. You can use an awl or like a screwdriver. If you don't have an awl.
But anyway, I'll leave instructions in the show notes cuz I did see a really good instruction post for this. And so you can make luminaries out of cans. You can put in a design or you can put in letters and spell out a word and it can be really cute.
And so you can either put in a wax candle or a battery operated candle inside to decorate your outside. You can also do things like making sheet ghosts by crumpling up newspaper [00:10:30] in the head, and then draping a white sheet over it, securing elastic around the neck to kind of make the head shape with the flowing body below, and you can hang them from a tree or from your porch.
I just wanna remind you to try to hang them from the top of the head of the ghost and not the neck, so that they look like ghosts and not dead bodies. Right. And then speaking of bodies, you can go a little kind of out there and you can outline your kids laying on the driveway and chalk, and then you can switch and have them outline you.
You can use cardboard to paint signs it could say caution or beware. And if the paint starts to drip, it just kind of adds to the effect. Now these might be a little bit morbid or scary, so perhaps that's a better idea for older children and not for our young toddlers. You can also use more natural materials in your decor, like twine or cotton.
You can make spiderwebs. Now another word of caution here because my neighbor actually told me this. We were talking about Halloween decor, and she said, Oh yeah, we tried doing spider webs. I tried doing cotton. The problem was. Birds were getting caught in it. So if you try that, perhaps keep it out of the flight path, or maybe it won't work in your area, maybe just maybe use twine or something that's not as sticky or as dense.
And that way hopefully you won't have birds or insects or things actually get caught in that. So anyway, that's another one. And then finally, do not underestimate the power of music. For the big night, you can use, and I'm talking. Trick or treating Halloween night, you can use a Bluetooth [00:12:00] speaker to play eerie sounds or keep a window open and play them from inside.
And then once the lights go down, we'll turn on our smart light bulb to a creepy color and we'll have music playing to set the mood on Halloween for anybody who visits our home. Right? So that's a really great way to do it. We actually have. Smart bulbs on our porch as our porch light.
And so we can change that to be whatever color we want. So that might be a lot of fun. We might change it to a black light or kind of a purple light to kind of help anybody that's in neon show up a little bit cooler as they come up and grab a treat. Okay, so those are a lot of ideas for the outside of your home.
Let's switch to the interior decor because a lot of those suggestions we just talked about, you could actually bring them inside too. But I have a few more options inside because you don't actually have to deal with the elements. So some of the things that we're doing inside of our home, we're cutting out paper bats out of black paper, and then I'm gonna be hanging them up on the walls with just a small loop of painters tape.
So really simple. And then at the end of the season, I can either save them for next year or I can recycle them if they get torn or kind of beat up or anything. We've done this with snowflakes over the holidays. We actually had each of our family members make a snowflake and we've been hanging them up for the last few years and that's been a lot of fun.
And so it's really easy to make paper things and then take them down. They just take a little bit of extra work at the beginning. I know a lot of people are selling these. You can find plastic ones on Amazon or Etsy or at the store, whatever. But you [00:13:30] can also make your own just cutting them out of paper.
It'll take you a little bit of time, but again, it's just saving that plastic from the landfill in the end. All right. Something else we did was we cut out a sign that says, Happy Halloween, out of scrapbook paper. And I made it into like a letter banner and it's hanging up on the wall. Now we also made a or cut out paper chain.
Links out of that same scrapbook paper and so we can put them together and hang that up if we decide we would like some more of that paper hanging around the house. And then I also created a super easy mummy pillow. I actually did this last night while we were watching tv, and it's a white pillow that I already had.
And I cut out two circles of black felt and two littler circles of white felt. And those are gonna make the eyes. And they made the eyes. And so then I just base stitched them onto the pillow. So really loosely stitched them just so they won't fall off. And then I used an ace bandage, and I wrapped it around just a couple times.
It's only on the top of the pillow. I'll have a picture of this so you can see it. And I base stitched that using white thread. And so now I have this really cute pillow, cost me nothing because I already had the felt and the ace bandage on hand along with the thread and needle and , in about 20 minutes I made this really cute little pillow that will be on our couch.
No extra clutter. Nothing to put away. Nothing to store. I will just, at the end of the season, I'll toss the [00:15:00] eyeballs. I could save them for next year if we want, depending on if they get kind of beat up being on the pillow or not. And then I'll just wrap up the ace bandage and put it back in our first aid kit.
Easy peasy. And it's really cute.
And then I'm going to be using flowers and mini pumpkins. Those are a great way to bring in nature, and they can carry over into November too. Obviously, if flowers won't last until November, but those mini pumpkins can last throughout the entire season.
And then another way to make ghosts. We talked about having ghosts outside. You can also make a ghost inside. You can just drape a sheet over a lamp. We have a floor lamp that I'm gonna try this with, and then you just tape black paper cutouts for the eyes in the mouth. Super easy, super festive. You don't even have to have an elastic like you do for the ones outside.
There's nothing to hang it from. And so really it's just draping a sheet. Super simple. And let's see. I'm also repurposing frames in our living room to include simple hand lettered and drawn artwork. We already have the frames, we know where we want to put them. We're just having a hard time deciding on the final prints from our travels.
So right now it's actually gonna be a really great placeholder. I get to kind. Finish our living space a little bit because now I have something in these frames and I can hang them on the wall. And we're gonna have a little bit more time to choose the photo prints. And I actually made these yesterday as well.
It was a fun little coloring project. I made one that says Eek and one that is a spider web. And they turned out so cute and I can't wait to get them. I'm gonna [00:16:30] hang them up today and I'll have a picture of those as.
In another area of our home, I'm gonna be creating a potion and spells area. We had a Harry Potter. Birthday party in the summer for our daughter. And so I'm gonna be using our wands, and then she's really into making various potions, so we're just gonna make sure that those are bottled up and we're gonna make labels and put them on there.
And then she could even create new spooky potions, right? If there's. Anything else she wants to make. And so one thing that you can do is you can take trinkets and treasures, things that are gonna be waterproof, any of those little plastic trinkets and treasures that they've gotten at birthday parties that are in their treasure bin.
This is really fun. You can put them in a jar, put in some water and some food coloring. Now just be careful because if it's white, it might actually stain, but you can just kind of put some things in there and then that way, You get to reuse them and they're out and they're being used and we'll look in the treasure bin and see if she wants to do this.
I don't know if she will, but that's a great suggestion for any of you that have all of those little knickknack things that you aren't sure what to do with this might be a fun way to do that. And then the final suggestion. Or inside of your house is to use candles to create a Halloween and kind of eerie atmosphere.
Now, there are so many options here when it comes to candles. You can go battery operated to keep it simple and safe around your young children. You can go scented and add another layer to the decor, right? Because then we get to another scent being brought in. So you can use [00:18:00] a scented candle. You can go tapered and create kind of a more traditional look with kind of dripping down the end, and it kind of, that really adds to kind of that spooky eeriness.
And really kind of the sky's the limit on the candles. Just make sure that you're using them. Don't save them. Don't save them for a rainy day. Light the candle. Enjoy the scent. Have fun with it. With all of these options, there's actually very little need for new items that you need to store, or plastic that's gonna end up in the garbage.
Right. Did you notice a lot of those are things we already have repurposing, making things up, using consumables, natural products. And so hopefully you'll be able to get a really festive atmosphere in your home without having to take a toll on mother nature.
All right, Now it's time to move on to costumes, and I'm gonna start with adults here because it's probable that your child, if they're school-aged, already knows what they want to be.
They've already been telling you about it. They already have an idea of what they want, and so, We're gonna start with the adults because you might be having a block here, or you might not know quite what to be.
In our home, we are still dressing as a trio. I will tell you what we're gonna be in just a minute, but if you're searching for an easy costume and your child is not on board with dressing as the family, then here are some really easy ideas that you can put together with little effort and probably with some of the things you already have in your closet.
If your child doesn't have [00:19:30] an idea, these can also work for them too. They're just more kind of generic costumes. They're not like a certain character or anything like that. Okay, the first three are all black outfits, so pretty much you can use exactly the same clothes and just kind of tweak them a little bit so wear all black.
And then if you put an eye mask on and carry a bag like a, like a big sack, you can be a thief or a robber if you put on black ears Instead, if you take off the face mask, put on black ears and use some eyeliner and draw whiskers on your face. You can be a cat if you want to. Wear all black and just put on a witch's hat.
You can be a witch, Carry around a broom with you if you'd like, if you want to have a prop with you. But again, really simple outfits and you just need a little accessory. You probably have black in your closet. You probably could come up with an all black outfit, and then you just need a small accessory to go with.
Another item or another outfit that might work would be the Brawny Man, right? The the paper towel guy. So he would be a flannel shirt, preferably a red flannel shirt, jeans, boots, and a roll of paper towels. Now this would be great for men, but women could be the Brawny man too. Why not? So you can just carry as long as you carry around the roll of paper towels, it'll be pretty easy for people to see and figure out what you.
[00:21:00] Another option is to be a bride. Now if you still have your dress, you can get one more wear out of it. I actually did this over the pandemic when we weren't going anywhere, but we just wanted to have fun. And so I got one more wear out of that dress and we were a bride. And my husband was a Zoom groom, so he just put on the suit top and wore like basketball shorts on the bottom. So it was kind of fun.
Another one would be to be the bachelorette from the TV show. If you have a formal dress or an old bridesmaids dress, don that get dressed up and then carry around a rose, pretty simple solution there.
Another one I saw was a skeleton. This one looked really cute. Basically, you just take an old white T-shirt, you cut out the middle to form ribs, and then you wear a black T-shirt underneath. I'll put the picture in the show notes because I think if you see this one, it'll make a lot more sense, but you basically just. Cut slits in the white shirt and wear the black shirt underneath.
And then you can be the skeleton. You can do your makeup too if you want to go the extra step, but pretty simple. And then another one that would work is like the farmer. So if you would have overalls, a flannel shirt, and then print out a sticker or print out like a little circle that says U S D A, like on the meat packages, right?
And then, Easy peasy farmer. And with all of these, you can pretty much get away with finding the stuff in your own closet to make those costumes so you don't even have to go out and [00:22:30] buy anything new. So think about those kinds of things when you are looking for something to dress up and then, have fun with it.
Don't take yourself too seriously. I'm not quite sure if the adults around here dress up, but we're gonna dress up because it's fun. Let's just have a good time with it.
All right, so let's talk about kids' costumes. Follow their lead when it comes to what they want to be for Halloween, but then try to think outside the box for how to complete the costume or the look.
Instead of rushing to buy the costume online, see if there's a way to DIY some of it or all of it with things that you already own or can repurpose. But please keep this simple. Don't make it too crazy. So our costumes this year are from the Disney TV movie Zombies 2. Our daughter is obsessed. We have been singing the music like crazy.
And so we are gonna go as the werewolf trio and some of the items we can use from our own closet. So we're gonna wear black jeans, we're gonna wear boots and then some of the items that I have purchased for the costume we're gonna be able to wear again. So I bought t-shirts in the correct color for the costume.
And so we will be able to wear these t-shirts again because they're just plain t-shirts. Now there are a few other things that we are purchasing for the costume, but they're not big, right? They're kind of these smaller accessory type things. And I can actually upcycle some of the things that we've used before.
Last year we went as characters from Raya. And so we had some fake fur, and I'm gonna go ahead and reuse that fake fur for [00:24:00] accessory pieces on the costume so we can just kind of use what we already have. And I just kept a small amount of it just in case we would need it again, cuz I do think this kind of stuff through and we have a Halloween bin already in the garage and I just put the stuff in there and then I can kind of go through that bin and find if we have anything that we can reuse.
Now the thing is making the costume like this is a little bit of compromise, right, when it comes to sustainability, because there are things we're purchasing, but I'm trying to keep those things small. And so these are the finishing touches .
Some of the details for us are gonna be the glow in the dark necklaces, the tooth embellishments. I'm gonna buy purple eyeshadow, but I can reuse that if I actually like the color. We're gonna be buying new shoes for our daughter, but they're high top converse, so she already wears those every single day.
Those are her go-to shoes. So I am buying her black Converse that we're gonna paint the toe gold to match the characters, but then she can rewear those again after Halloween. And we're not gonna be purchasing wigs because I think we're gonna just go with our imagination. We're gonna style our hair similar to the characters, but we're not going to use the wigs cuz that's just plastic to add to the landfill.
My daughter hates wearing them anyway cuz they're scratchy and itchy. They never stay on. And so we're getting away from wigs. We didn't, wigs were not a big thing when I was a kid and dressing up. So we're gonna pull back from that a little bit. And now the outfits are not going to be exact replicas, so [00:25:30] we're letting that go too.
When we're making our kids' costumes, we're letting go of trying to be Exactly. We're not cosplaying. We're not going to ComicCon here. We are just having a balance between being creative and using our imaginations because honestly, I don't think there are many people. Around us in the on this planet that would actually know who we are, right?
Zombies two was not a big blockbuster hit. If your child is not within the right age range, you probably have not seen this movie and so. Not that many people are gonna know who we are, even if we looked exactly like the character. So we're just gonna have a little fun. We're gonna be kinder to Mother Earth and just make the costumes for ourselves.
So for me, minimalism and sustainability are ways for us to do better. It's not about being perfect. We're not going to be perfect because being perfect would be not decorating, not dressing up for Halloween. And honestly, that wouldn't be much fun. And it really wouldn't make much of a dent in helping the environment anyway.
It just wouldn't, One family isn't gonna make that big of an impact. So instead, we're going to do our best to be mindful of the materials that we use, and I'm going to encourage others to do the same. And that's what I'm doing here today.
So if your children are younger, I want to kind of remind you for costumes to reach out to other families, friends, neighbors, see if anybody has any costumes that you could borrow, because again, they grow out of these costumes so fast. They're going to wear them one [00:27:00] time. We don't really need to be buying something new. All of the costumes that you will find kind of in a hand me down are going to be in really great shape because again, the kids are wearing them for a few hours and that is it. So try to find something that's kind of a hand me down and then go forward from there and I think it'll be great.
And now it's time to look at the third category when it comes to celebrating Halloween and how to make it a little simpler.
It's time for the treat part of trick or treat. So when it comes to treats, it seems like people fall into either the pro candy or the pro trinket category. Well, I guess there is the no treat and turn your lights off crowd too, but, As we're getting to the end of this semi long Halloween episode, I'm guessing that I lost that group a long time ago.
So let's go ahead and start with the pro trinket crowd. Now I get the idea of giving toys or goods instead of candy in the name of health because. I mean, yikes. There's, you know, an obesity epidemic in the us. So if you didn't know for those kids that are allergic to certain candies, I absolutely get the idea here.
And those are both very noble efforts, but the trinkets are often plastic junk that just ends up in the landfill. So, of course some homes will give out things like pencils, erasers, stickers, bookmarks, and a newer option that I am seeing online are scrunchies. Now, the issue I see here is that a lot of the older kids might not be as excited about these things unless you are a girl between the [00:28:30] ages of maybe eight and 12.
And the scrunchy idea is really exciting to you. But I digress. So that brings me to the Pro Candy Group. Now, this is actually where you're going to find me. I mean, Candy is a consumable after all. However, when our daughter was younger, I do wanna say that we did limit how much candy we received. We went to fewer houses.
We kind of made it a little bit easier on ourselves . And if we did end up with a lot of candy, there was one year that we ended up with buckets of candy. Long story, but we ended up saving a lot of that candy to make gingerbread house in December.
So, We try to limit the amount of candy that we actually eat, but the main issue with the candy is the packaging. Very little of the packaging is actually recyclable. To help with that, this year I'm going to be look out on the lookout for candy. That's a little bit more sustainable, right? Like a paper packaging or more sustainable packaging.
I'm gonna be looking at things like pixie sticks and Fun Dip. I know pixie sticks are made with paper and I, I think Fun Dip is too, but I'm gonna check. We'll look on that one. Now, another clever idea is to give out drink mixes like hot cocoa or apple cider, but I don't think those packages are recyclable.
So that's a little bit of a caveat, but it's a little bit different as well. Or I might even splurge and get the larger box candy this year because I hear we actually don't have that many trick or treaters on our street. So those can get a little pricey though. They're [00:30:00] about a dollar or so a box, maybe even a little bit.
Oh, Over a dollar. But I like the idea of the box, right, because it's easily recyclable. And then there's one more really crazy idea that I am considering, and it's canned sparkling waters. It's super out there. I know. But while researching for this episode, I came across this idea and it seems it's a hit in some places and I could see it working in our neighborhood, so I might give it a go.
I'll report back. I don't know. We'll see. At the time of this recording, it looks like Costco has LaCroixs for about 63 cents per can. Target has some good and gather options for only 43 cents per can. So I might give it a try and try the, the target brand of the good and gather. And the best part is that the aluminum can be easily recyclable.
Plus I'm thinking that there's another. Tip here, like or another kind of bonus, right? Because if we leave a bowl of candy out for the trick or treaters, because we're also gonna go out trick treating, and again, we're the trio, right? So all three of us will be there. It's going to be less tempting for the kids to take.
All of the sodas because they're really heavy, right? Like if you leave a bowl out, it's really easy for a teen to come by and just dump the whole bowl into their what is it, pillowcase, and then go away, right? But if you have a whole like 12 pack of cans, they're gonna have a hard time taking them all.
The idea here is that with the treats, there really is no perfect option. So if we end up going with the trinkets, try to think of things that can [00:31:30] actually be used instead of just those little plastic toys that are going to break that are really cheaper are gonna end up in the landfill pretty much within a few days. If you go the candy route, try to find something where the packaging is a little more eco-friendly. We really have to kind of just play the game of balance here. And also we can do a really good job by trying to make sure that the amount of candy we have is a reasonable amount.
I know people have been going bigger and bigger on the candy, and I realized last year when we went out, people were just giving like handfuls of candy away. It was a lot of candy. So maybe we can just kind of scale back. I hope that doesn't turn us into the Ba Humbug house, but then maybe that's why something like the The sparkling waters worked, so I don't know.
We'll see. Like I said, I will try it and report back, and that just about wraps it up for simple ways that you can keep the candy and not the clutter this Halloween. As you can see, there are lots of ways that we can be festive, have a blast, and still be mindful of how we are decorating and celebrating.
Just takes a moment of reflection and looking at things in a creative way instead of just automatically hitting that buy button. And now I wanna hear from you. How do you celebrate Halloween? Do you have any favorite traditions? Do you have a favorite costume? What do you give out to trick or treaters?
Come on over to the Wannabe Minimalist Family group on Facebook and share. I would really love to know maybe you have a unique way of doing things that others will love too. So let's [00:33:00] share and lift each other up on our journeys toward living better lives for ourselves, our families, and the earth.
Don't forget, you can see examples of some of these ideas and get the show notes on my website@wannabeclutterfree.com slash one 20. Again, that's wannabe clutter free slash the number 1 2 0. And if you wanna see pictures from my home, join me on Instagram. I wanna be clutter free over there. And I will be posting photos of our decor throughout the season.
And as always, thank you for joining me too. If you made it this far, I would be thrilled if you left me a review on Apple Podcast. Your reviews make my day and it helps me know what you want to hear more of. And with that, I hope you have a fabulous day, and I'll see you back here next week when I will be chatting with Stephanie Seferian about sustainable minimalism.
It was a lot of fun getting to speak with another minimalist, and she has some interesting things to share. You won't wanna miss it. I'm Deanna Yates, and you've been listening to The Wannabe Minimalist Show. Cheers.
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