We have chosen to raise our children to celebrate Halloween in a fun and innocent way. In our home we give the pumpkin and season of fall itself the spot light. We do pumpkin painting every year, fall crafts, pumpkin story books, Charlie Brown movies, and trick or treating. Usually we would do a Trunk or Treat with our Church.

I grew up seeing some friends not being able to Trick or Treat and felt as if they were missing out on so much fun. I wouldn’t want our children to miss out as well.

The HUGE dilemma with most parents is wanting to avoid the Halloween characters, as I call them. The: ghosts, goblins, skeletons, witches, vampires and werewolf’s.

The reality is they are everywhere and they are also PRETEND. Our two year old is starting to notice them in his pumpkin books, and in stores. We were walking through Walmart the other day and he pointed out the big blow up skeleton with the axe. “Yep baby that’s a Halloween character, he is spooky but he is pretend.”

He may not know what any of that means yet. But he will over time as we continue to talk about it each year. I use the term ‘character’ just as I would for the Leprechaun for St. Patrick’s Day, The Easter Bunny for Easter, and Santa for Christmas. If we dramatize the ‘characters’ then they may appear more scary and real instead of pretend. I wouldn’t bring our children to a haunted house or show them scary movies to prove my point. But I cannot shut the Halloween characters out from the world we live in. So as we see them in books, and at the stores they are as I mentioned above PRETEND spooky but not real. They cannot hurt us.

We plan to celebrate the season, the pumpkin, and innocent fun that we choose Halloween to be for our family.