Each day we will be posting A Thrifty Halloween Tip, from our readers. At the end of the month, one of you will win a $25.00 Visa Gift Card. For all the details click here. Keep those thrifty tips coming!!!
Thanks to Tyree for sharing todays Thrifty tip,
We do the clearance costumes from Target at the end of the season for the next year. I’ve gotten great ones for between $2-$10. One year we even gave them to our girls for Christmas as dress-up dresses. They loved them and play with them all the time. The Elizabeth Swan Pirates costume has been their favorite “Mulan” Costume. This way they have fun dress up throughout the year and a ton of choices come Halloween. I don’t like the idea of my kids thinking we need a brand new costume just for Halloween every year. We can get creative and make costumes too if their is something they want to be but we don’t have quite the right thing. We also pass down costumes and use them for the younger kids. We trade with my sister so that their is more to choose from and it can be something new and exciting. (She buys more actual costumes than we do and her kids are now all bigger than mine–even her youngest that is younger than my oldest. But she is happy to let us borrow her past costumes.)
We of course use coupons and find deals on the candy for trick or treaters–we used to just go to Winco cause they have good deals on candy around halloween and thats another good option. We like pumpkin patchs, but they can be expensive so we will buy a couple pumpkins from wal-mart (I found two really big ones their this year for $2.98 each) then on Halloween or the day before I’ll take the girls to the pumpkin patch (they usually mark the pumpkins to 50% off or less by then.) That way they still get the experience without the huge inflated cost.
We have a tradition of watching a movie and eating a pomagranite together after trick or treating (it’s usually cold here and we don’t want to stay out in it to long.) My girls look forward to this as much as trick or treating. We usually get a fun kid halloween movie from the library or use one from home. There are all kinds of fun free crafts online. A lot of them involve recycling (milk jug skeleton etc.) I always like to look/google and just see what might be fun for the current year for what we have on hand. Our library does a special costume story time, they get to hear Halloween stories, dress up and trick or treat all around the library. My mom does a special Halloween family dinner (not on Halloween but sometime the week of). It is so fun to see the different scary creations everyone comes up with. It doesn’t have to cost money to have a great time. It’s the traditions, fun, and family they will remember not how much you spent on their costume.
I have to add one year I made a “Bell-beauty and the beast dress” for my daughter for Halloween and my neighbor lent us the snow white one she made for my baby. We went to the mall and got photos made for under $10. It was so worth it, they are some of my kids favorite photos. If you do go through the trouble one year to do something special for their costumes it’s worth taking the time to get great photos so they can remember.
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