Celebrate Halloween for Free Indoors and Celebrate History

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Halloween is a great time of the year to spend some extra time with the kids. Often my kids don't go out to trick or treat anymore. We tend to stay in the house and enjoy special family time. If you will be staying indoors on Halloween, here are a few ideas on free things that the whole family can enjoy.

Have a Family Fright Fest night. Numerous television stations play Halloween-themed marathons on the night before Halloween and on Halloween night. Pop some popcorn, grab a few blankets and everyone can gather around the TV and watch some all-time favorite movies like Halloween, Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street.

Family Activity Night - The web is filled with sites where you can find Halloween printable coloring sheets. You can find mummy masks, bats, Frankenstein and more. Some of my favorite sites to visit are TheKidzPage.com and Kaboose.com.

Make Halloween sugar cookies. You can search the web if you need a recipe but you really only need sugar, baking soda, flour, baking powder and butter. Have fun with the shapes of the cookies. If you have some food coloring hanging around the house, you can add that to the mixture to produce some pretty fun looking cookies.

Dress Up Night - My daughter absolutely loves to play in my clothes and shoes. Every now and then I will let her try on a few of my clothes and model them for the family. We always take pictures and look back later on with fond memories. An added twist to this is we let our baby dress up in things we find around the house (old costumes, hand-me-downs, etc). When trick or treaters come to the house, we let him give out the candy.

Arts and Crafts - I have found tons and tons of free craft ideas for Halloween. Some are as simple as making a black cat out of a paper plate. However if you are really adventurous, there are many more advanced craft ideas as well. One of my favorite sites AllCrafts.net has a balloon spider, a glowing crystal ball, cheesecloth ghosts and more.

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No matter what you decide to do on Halloween night, be safe and have fun!

The History of Halloween

Halloween (or Hallowe'en) is an annual holiday observed on October 31, which commonly includes activities such as trick-or-treating, attending costume parties, carving jack-o'-lanterns, bonfires, apple bobbing, visiting haunted attractions, playing pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films.

Historian Nicholas Rogers, exploring the origins of Halloween, notes that while "some folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, it is more typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain, whose original spelling was Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)". The name of the festival historically kept by the Gaels and Celts in the British Isles is derived from Old Irish and means roughly "summer's end".

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English folk lore: "Certainly Samhain was a time for festive gatherings, and medieval Irish texts and later Irish, Welsh, and Scottish folklore use it as a setting for supernatural encounters, but there is no evidence that it was connected with the dead in pre-Christian times, or that pagan religious ceremonies were held."

The Irish myths which mention Samhain were written in the 10th and 11th centuries by Christian monks. This is around 200 years after the Catholic church inaugurated All Saints Day and at least 400 years after Ireland became Christian.

From bellaonline.com wikipedia.org