Ultimate Tricks And Treats For Halloween Happiness

By: Kim Seidler | Last updated: Oct 23, 2023

As the leaves turn from green to golden and the air whispers of pumpkin spice and spooky tales, it can only mean one thing—Halloween is creeping around the corner in all its ghoulish glory.

Whether you are an obsessed Halloween haunter or just love to watch the fun from afar—it is the time of year when our childlike spirits are set free to create, conjure and celebrate. Well, buckle up your broomsticks, fasten your fake fangs, and practice your biggest BOO, because here are thirteen spooktacular tricks and treats for your ultimate Halloween fun!

The Haunted House

BOO, it yourself and transform your home into an eerie haunted house oasis that will leave the Disneyland version quaking at its foundations. DIY decorations don’t need to break the bank and are a heck of a lot of fun to make.

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Cute or creepy? This question forms the beginnings of the transformative fun!
If creepy is your calling, think jars stuffed with red or green colored string lights, cotton balls, and giant black plastic spiders decorating your halls.

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Voodoo Candles

Channel your inner Spiderman and throw cobwebs around the house with stellar skills, ready to catch unsuspecting prey. Or what about some Voodoo candle vibes? Drip blood-red wax over white candles and stick them with nails to create deathly shadows.

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Painting empty toilet rolls black, cutting out eyes, and illuminating them with glowsticks creates spooky garden décor and a few shrieks from the neighbors. Drop a few plastic creepy crawlies into clear soap dispenser bottles for that extra scary scent.

Make Your Own Tombstones

Or is a garden graveyard more your game? Fashion some cardboard tombstones around the lawn (RIP Mrs. Black Widow), and add the finishing touch of a limb or two clawing its way from the earth—desperate to join your Halloween fiesta.

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Perhaps your house of horrors was once a mad scientist’s deathly, dark and torturous lab, with their victims’ brains suspended in jars—lining your shelves as a ghostly reminder. Your friends don’t need to know these are just cauliflower heads with strategic streaks of permanent red marker, do they?

Spookily Cute Halloween Decor Ideas

Or is spookily cute more your style? If so, mummify those mason jars with bandages and googley eyes instead. Or grab empty bottles of all shapes and sizes, paint them white, and add some ghosty funny faces to watch you while you eat. Can can also illuminate your little friends and add some tea light candles to make them glow whilst they gleam at you.

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Or even better, make those jars your new spooky season mugs! Serve up a side of scream with your morning smoothie, a ghostily ice-coffee to your friends, or you whatever takes your fancy in your cute Halloween glassware.

DIY Halloween Decor: Bat Toilet Roll Craft

Instead of stalking eyes, drive your household batty and turn your toilet rolls into these winged cave-dwelling creatures of the night with a splash of black paint, red eyes and cardboard wings. Keep the bat theme rolling with a creepy centerpiece for your dining table. Grab a red jar, beatify a bunch of twigs with black spray paint and stick your cardboard bats amongst the tiny branches. You won’t have to worry about watering that flower arrangement—the more dead, the better!

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Get your glitter on with a dazzling witch’s broom. Simply buy an old-school straw broom and get crafty with sequins and all things shiny. Leave it adorned with a pointed black hat by the front door, ready for that quick fly to the store!

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Unleash Your Creativity: DIY Halloween Decor Ideas

These are just the tip of the scary ice cube of DIY decorations. There is so much Halloween inspiration to find around the house.

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Start rummaging through the recycling for bottles, containers and cardboard, and grab your scissors, paints and imagination to haunt your home with style. Tip: a packet of googley eyes 👀 in all sizes is essential.

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Eerie Entertainment

Add a chill to the spine to match the crisp Fall air with some classic scary screen time. Host a Halloween movie night by the fireplace or under the stars.

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Keep it light and family-friendly with shows like Hocus Pocus, Practical Magic, Gremlins, Beetlejuice, or Ghostbusters. Or creep into the old-school realm with Nightmare On Elm Street, Silence of the Lambs, and the iconic Halloween (of course). Or, do the time warp and add a fancy dress code for the evening with The Rocky Horror Show as the main event. Don’t forget to add a touch of spooky sparkle with candles, Halloween-themed cushions, and blankets. Fun tip: add a natural red or green food coloring to your popcorn for extra freaky fun.

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Creepy Cocktails

While we are on the topic of hosting, get into the spirit with some spooky spirits! Put the BOO in boozy with these devilishly decadent drink ideas: Blood-orange Margaritas, A Jekyll & Gin, Pumpkin Pie punch, or a Spiced Bloody Mary will get your friends in the macabre mood. Go all out and decorate them with gummy worms, plastic spiders, fairy floss webs and floating eyeballs for extra creepiness.

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Here is a recipe to get your spooky party started:

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Vampire's Kiss

20ml rasberry liqueur
25 ml vodka
Ice
Handful frozen raspberries
Red sugar to garnish (optional)
Champagne, to top up.

Chill a martini or cocktail glass. Pour the raspberry liqueur and vodka into a shaker and add a handful of ice and the raspberries.

Mix until the shaker feels very cold. Dip the rim of the chilled glasses into cold water, then into the colored sugar (if using).

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Fine strain the cocktail into the glasses, and top with champagne. Garnish with a pair of vampire teeth holding a cherry. Enjoy!

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Freaky Food

Any gathering needs great food, and a Halloween menu calls for the fun and the freaky–yet it can still be fancy.
Supernatural and sophisticated snacks such as Breadstick Rattlers will make your guests salivate and squeal. Twist your dough into snakey bodies, scatter poppyseeds for scales, add a sundried or chili “tongue,” and bake till golden.

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Similarly, pop an almond “nail”, and some roasted red pepper dip on the end instead and you have a set of wickedly delicious witches fingers to serve and tickle your guests!

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Spooky Halloween Recipe

Pumpkin needs an appearance, of course! Try Smokey Pumpkin Deviled Eggs or Mimi Mummy Pumpkin and Feta Tarts. For some magical mains, think Monster Meatball Sliders, Herbed Rice and Chorizo Jack’O Lantern Peppers, and Evil Eye Pasta (beware, those mozzarella eyeballs will be watching you).

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Sinfully Sweet Halloween Desserts: Indulge in the Dark Delights

And those darkly deathly delicious desserts are endless—Meringue Ghost Tartlets, Dead Velvet Cake, and Poison Apple Pie are just the beginning.

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There is way too much fun to have here. So, get your creepy creative on with an array of colored icings, insect-shaped gummies, and Halloween-inspired sprinkles.

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Goulishy Good Treats

Aside from spooky sweets, ghoulishly good treats are a must. It’s the one time of year that you don’t have to feel guilty about eating candy!

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Store-bought sweets are great, but why not try making your own?

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Chocolate Spiders and Ghost Pretzels

Chocolate spiders with red licorice legs and white Chocolate-Dipped Ghost Pretzels are quick, easy and delicious. Marshmallow Heads on sticks (with smiling vampires, mummies, and Frankensteins) will make your trick-or-treaters giggle with glee.

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Or entice them with a Poison Candy Apple oozing gummy worms, or harboring black spiders

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Ghoulishly Guilt-Free Goodies

Halloween can be a sugar overload, so try these ghoulishly guilt-free treats if you are after a healthier Halloween. Banana Mummy Pops with sugar-free chocolate bandages and blueberry eyeballs.

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Or Vegan Pecan Pie Fudge, Spooky Boo-Berries (chocolate-covered strawberries with cheeky faces), and Mint-Matcha Frankenstein cookies. Whichever treats tickle your fancy, the idea here is to enjoy the festivities in whatever way makes you happy.

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Treating or Trick

Spread some spooky love this season and go for a Halloween heart-warming gesture instead. Reverse trick-or-treating, and visit your friends and neighbors with Halloween-inspired gifts and goodies. You’ll be like the little red-riding hood of the street, with a basket full of black kitten cupcakes, witch’s finger cookies, and zombie pops.

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It’s a BOO-tiful way to say a happy Halloween. And you never know; you might just lift someone’s spooky spirit with your visit.

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Kooky Karaoke.

As we are still in party mode, end the evening with a Halloween-themed karaoke session. Someone will definitely bust out “Thriller” (along with the dance, hopefully) and the “Moster Mash” or “Highway to Hell” by AC/DC.

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It’s fun and gets everyone giggling. And for those shy singers, it’s the perfect excuse to be as silly as they want, as this is not a serious singing moment.

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Terrifying Tales.

After dinner, gather your friends and family, and Facetime, Zoom, or snuggle on the couch for spooky Storytime. Make them up, share urban legends, and see how many people you can make squirm in their seats. Make sure you turn off the light and do it right with candles, torches, and the odd planned bump in the night.

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And to add some extra frightening flair to your freaky fables, some door scratching, key jangling, and a sheeted ghost or two joining the circle never goes astray.

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Ghostly Games

Halloween is the season for games! If you have a dusty box of Cluedo lying around, now is the time to find out who killed, with what and where!

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Or grab the more modern Betrayal at House on the Hill and Horrified to up the ante. However, there are plenty of fun DIY games.

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Frighteningly Fun Halloween Party Activities

For those sweet tooths, have some mischievous munching madness with Ghost Marshmallows On A String. Draw spooky faces on your squishy treats and hang them from a broom; players must eat them with their hands behind their backs. The first to devour their ghosty treat wins!

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Test your acting skills with Horror Charades, or hone your detective senses with Deadly Wink—a game of mystery where your “murderer” kills their chosen victim with a sly deadly wink and then the race to find “who dunnit” begins!

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Halloween Twist: Classic Games Reimagined

Or just get plain crazy and divide into teams and wrap a buddy up in toilet paper and make them bolt like zombies to the finish line.

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Ir doesnt matter what ages your are. Have blast from the past with apple bobbing, “eyebal” egg and spoon races, or celebrity head. It’s a time to release your inner child and have a ball with whatever crazy kookiness you can. The wicked games box of fun Halloween ideas is filled to the brim. You can just about transform any of your favorite games into a Halloween theme. With just a flick of your magic wand…

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Creepy Costumes

And this, my friends, is what this scary season is all about! A great Halloween begins with an awesome costume. From the cute to the crazy and the weird and wicked, your outfit is crucial.

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It’s easy to get sidetracked decorating and cooking, and before you know it, O’Hallow’s Eve has snuck up and you’re costume-less!

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Last-Minute DIY Halloween Costumes for a Monster Mash

So, if you haven’t had the time to go shopping, here are some quick and easy DIY costumes to get you in the monster mood. Grab a watermelon, throw on some denim shorts, and channel in your “Baby’ vibes from Dirty Dancing. Curled green and blue balloons and rubber snakes make a magnificent Medusa wig.

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And a clear, plastic sheeting “jar” dress decorated with gold ribbon trim and some battery powered string lights, will have you glowing beautifully as a friendly firefly jar. Or be on trend as a double denimed Ken Doll, complete with a pink bandana and glow-in-the-dark sneakers. You’ll be surprised at what you can muster up with a bit of imagination, tape and glue!

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Books With BOO

Halloween is the perfect time for spooky literature, and Fall calls for coziness. You could form a spontaneous Halloween Book club or solo snuggle under the covers and creep into other worlds with classics like Carrie and Pet Cemetery by Stephen King.

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Or embrace the more magical side of the holiday with The Very Secret Society Of Witches or Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman. Accessorize with a black cat on your lap and a spiced pumpkin latte.

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Pumpkins. Pumpkins

Halloween and Fall are synonymous with Pumpkins! Not only are they bestowed with the golden colors of Autumn and marry perfectly with spice, but they are the quintessential stars of the season.

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They light up our nights as Jack’o lanterns; their sweet flesh flavors our pies, puddings, lattes, soups and sweets, and they offer nostalgic bonding moments as you pick your prize from the patch.

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Unique Designs for Halloween

The humble pumpkin provides a festive canvas for fun. So why not try some unique carvings this year?

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Those plastic mice peeping out from glowing holes in your Mouse and Cheese pumpkin may send your friends squealing, but your Hungry Monster lantern with that baby pumpkin in its jaws will gain a giggle or two. Maybe organize a neighborhood pumpkin carving contest this year and leave a pretty trail of pumpkins down the street to light the way.

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Magic Memories.

Halloween is a time of family, friends and fun. Set up a DIY photo booth with accessories and props. Polaroid and disposable cameras will work a treat and do the trick nicely here. You can leave the pop-up booth in the hall for when people visit, or hang out in the front yard and call your neighbors in as they go for their evening stroll (their cute little pet may want to star in a snap, too!)

Your pop-up photo stand will help capture those magic memories and encourage everyone to dress up, get in the festive spirit, and have fun. And those goofy photos will make you smile for years to come.

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I Got the Boos Blues

We can’t forget the music that sets the Halloween tone, you can save and curate the ultimate Halloween playlist for your home and for trick-or-treaters who may stop by to visit in order to set the mood for all that cross your path this spooky season.

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If you’re feeling extra adventurous and musical then you can even get together with other musically inclined individuals for a haunting jam session that fits the Halloween theme. If the party really gets going then it might even turn into an event.

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Ready, Get Set, Spook!

With a splash of creepy creativity and a dash of DIY magic, your Halloween will be a happy and spooktacular celebration that will leave your family and friends echoing the chilling words of Morticia Addams…

“Last night, you were unhinged. You were like some desperate, howling demon. You frightened me. It was great! Do it again, pleaseeeeeee!”

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So, grab your cauldron, stir up some fun, and add a sprinkle of spontaneity this October. May it be bewitching and beautiful.

Happy Halloween Everyone!

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