Spooky Fun Fest

As you all may know, for the past few months the whole world has been suffering through a deadly pandemic called Covid-19. With that said, people were still looking forward to October’s annually celebrated holiday: Halloween! Since Halloween is typically celebrated by going outdoors, I imagined that there would be more people staying home for safety purposes. But staying home this year didn’t have to put a stop to anyone’s spooky festivities! I am here to share some of the many activities that could’ve been done indoors this year. 

One of the many activities that could have been done at home this year to keep the spooky festivities going would’ve been to have a movie marathon! You and your loved ones could have grabbed some candy corn, popcorn, and binged Halloween movies throughout the whole day. There are many must-watch family-friendly movies on Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu. These movies include but are not limited to Hubie Halloween, The Addams Family(1991), Addams Family(2019), The Nightmare Before Christmas, Twitches, Halloweentown, Frankenweenie, Hocus Pocus, and Double, Double, Toil and Trouble. Hulu even has a feature made where you can watch an episode correlating to Halloween from some of your favorite shows! Aside from those streaming services, a channel called Freeform streams those movies and more every Halloween. One movie must-watch in particular that some of our Panthers suggest is Hocus Pocus! Hocus Pocus is about a teenage boy named Max, who recently moved to Salem, Massachusetts. He explores an abandoned house with his sister and their friend. Max accidentally frees a coven of evil witches who once lived in that house. The kids meet a magical cat and create a plan to steal the witches’ book so that they can stop the witches from becoming immortal. 

If you were looking to do something more crafty this Halloween, I have some spooktacular ideas to share with you! Mrs. Welch, the art teacher of K-101, suggested something more on the personal side. It’s called an ofrenda. Ofrendas are traditionally made for a Mexican holiday called Día De Los Muertos or Day of the Dead. The Day of the Dead is celebrated on different days by many diverse civilizations. It’s a day where people can honor those who have departed. Making an ofrenda allows the spirits of the dead to visit their living loved ones and feel welcomed. It’s quite an easy and rewarding project to accomplish. To make an ofrenda use a collage of photos and something to represent the four elements(water, wind, earth, and fire). You could also make Calaveras or Papel Picado. These two things are traditionally a part of Ofrenda making. If you’re more of a baking kind of person, you could’ve made Halloween cutout cookies! There’s nothing better than a craft that you can eat. 

Both the movie marathon and crafts are exciting alone, imagine if you had combined the two! Baking and decorating cookies while watching Hocus Pocus, or making your own Ofrenda while watching Coco. The Halloween spirit definitely would have been kept alive.

If you were looking to keep some Halloween normalcy going this year, you could have given out treats from a distance, of course. A fellow Panther, Katrina Phillips, decided to stay home this year due to Covid-19. Instead of dressing up and going out, she stayed home, set up a table with a bowl outside, sat in a chair a little over six feet away from the table, and once she was done she sanitized the bowl.  I asked her if she still had the same amount of fun this year as she usually does every Halloween and she said, “I most definitely enjoyed this year’s Halloween! Even more so because it was fun being able to see all of the creative costumes that families came up with in my community.” I would say this allowed her to get a new perspective on Halloween- a good one. Katrina now plans on staying home for many Halloweens to come. It could be a new and great experience for you as well.

No matter how big a pandemic, our spook-tivities should not have been put on hold, and they did not have to be! There were many activities to be done and far more beyond that. Maybe next year, hopefully without a pandemic, you could give some of these a try. You would be surprised about how much fun you would have!