October flew by this year and we hardly noticed… Sunny warm hot days fooled us into thinking we had all the time in the world. Oops! I woke up the morning before Halloween feeling guilty that we hadn’t done any of our annual traditions.

It was too late for our annual visit to the pumpkin patch and our photo session among the pumpkins, and the decorations will have to stay in storage until next year, but we ended up creating some new traditions, decorating pumpkins and baked goods, watching Halloween themed movies, and touring our neighborhood, which has some of the best Halloween decorations I’ve ever seen.

The Pumpkins

This year Tim and Simon went to the grocery store to get pumpkins, while Elliot and I stayed home, it was great! I absolutely didn’t miss wandering around in the pumpkin patch looking for just the right one. Very liberating! I did miss out on the cute photo tho…

I usually do a pop culture pumpkin, but since everything else is different this year… I went with a Day of the Dead theme. After I carved out the eyes and nose I painted, colored with sharpie pens, and even used modpodge to get my finished look!

Simon and Elliot both opted not to carve this year. Simon used paint as a base and then used modpodge to attach the meme he created on his computer!

Elliot drew his Pokemon Bellsprout design directly onto his pumpkin with sharpie pens.

If you decide to decorate your pumpkin with paint and sharpie pens, it’s a good idea to dull the tip of your Sharpie prior to using it on the painted surface or it might scrape off the paint.

The Baking

As long as I’ve had kids I’ve been baking sugar cookies for Halloween, but we’ve been enjoying a lot of donuts lately and decided it might be fun to make Halloween donuts instead! Williams Sonoma has a really nice and inexpensive donut pan, which worked perfectly! We had a great time coming up with fun “scary” donuts!

The Neighborhood

We stumbled across these amazing decorations while driving home one evening and just knew we had to bring the kids back to see them! A pirate ship, a white wedding, and a haunted dog walker were just a few of the amazing decorations at this one home!

Though many of our annual traditions went by the wayside this year there is one we won’t be leaving out: trick or treating! With neighborhoods like this to walk through I’m counting on an interesting, but hopefully, not too spooky Halloween!

Happy Halloween!