How to Green Your Halloween

Halloween is here again, time for tricks and treats and fun or spooky decorations. If you have trick-or-treaters in your house or enjoy the neighborhood kids when they ring your doorbell on All Hallows' Eve, you might be glad to learn that there are many ways to green your Halloween.

Green your Halloween treat carriers. Provide reusable treat bags or buckets for your children to use when trick-or-treating. Avoid disposable plastic or paper bags that will end up in a landfill. If you sew, why not stitch a drawstring into the top of a pillowcase and draw or paint a spooky ghost face on one side. You can also decorate cloth or canvas reusable shopping bags. Better yet, make a bag out of a Halloween-themed t-shirt like those in the article Homemade Reusable Shopping Bags.

Rather than spending money on cheaply made costumes that are only worn once, green your Halloween by tapping into your creative side and creating costumes using clothing and other items you have on hand. Sweat suits, leotards and turtlenecks are terrific foundations to start with. Cardboard packaging from your kitchen, hardware from your garage and scraps of fabric can go a long way toward making cute, custom, environmentally friendly getups.

Similarly, you can green your Halloween by creating homemade face paint using supplies that you already have on hand. Much of Mom's makeup can be used to add rosy cheeks, whiskers or clown faces. Your kitchen is a useful resource as well. Mix up a tablespoon of shortening with a teaspoon of flour for face paint. Add drops of food coloring to create all of the colors you need.

If you decorate every year, green your Halloween by keeping and reusing as many of the decorations as you can. Consider purchasing a faux carved Jack-o-lantern to use every year rather than purchasing a pumpkin that will end up in the trash. Alternatively, check out How to Reuse a Halloween Pumpkin to find ideas on ways to green your Halloween cleanup.

Organic foods are better for the environment, so green your Halloween by handing out organic goodies. Honey sticks are a delicious sweet treat with many beneficial health properties (avoid giving honey to children under the age of two). Individually wrapped packages of organic pumpkin seeds, fruit leather or dried fruit are suitable options as well.

Finally, you can green your Halloween by staying close to home. Avoid driving to another neighborhood simply because they dole out the best treats or pull out the stops on Halloween decorations. Walking around your own neighborhood has heaps of benefits. You avoid releasing automotive emissions into the air, you get great exercise with your family and you can even become better acquainted with folks that live around you. What could be better than that?