Halloween With Little Monsters: Entertaining Your Brood On A Budget

Enjoying Halloween with your kids doesn’t just mean trick or treating. There are so many fun ideas out there, but, unfortunately, it comes at a price – literally. A seasoned aunt speaking, rest-assured there is hope for you when it comes to making memories with your little monsters outside of trick or treating. One way you can really run with all the spooky fun is throwing a Halloween party. I know, I said the ‘P’ word. That usually comes with a hefty price tag. Here I share how my family entertained seven of our family’s kids, moms and dads included, and how we tackled it all without going above $100 – not even close.

Recycle Your Decorations/ Dollar Store Finds

The first thing I did was recycle my Halloween decorations at home and combined it with my mom’s, who hosted the party. Word to the wise: While your kids are little, dollar store decorations will do the job. A lot of my decorations come from the dollar stores. Now that everything is available online, I’d hit up Family Dollar and Target’s dollar spot before any major holiday so you can get a good deal on party favors and decorations. Just about everything came from these two stores.

Food That Feeds A Crowd

You know what food feeds an entire graveyard of zombies? PASTA. Always, always think pasta when you’re entertaining. Always. It’s cheap, you can gussy it up (like I talk about here), and in the case of Halloween, you can dye the noddles black or green or orange (we did green) with food coloring and you have yourself a down-right spooky meal. We called our spaghetti and alfredo sauce (we dyed the sauce red) ‘worms in slime’ and you bet our little monsters totally gobbled it up. We also had sprite with gummy worms in it. Fun!

Downsize The Crafts

Instead of buying seven carving pumpkins at $5 a piece, we opted for those bags of mini pumpkins for $2.50 per bag (each bag had roughly five mini pumpkins) and let the kids paint them. We purchased two bags and bought a box of crayola paint at Target for $5. We purchased a set of paint brushes for $1 at Family Dollar and let their imaginations run wild. It was adorable, it ate up quite a bit of time, and they had a fun craft to take home. Other crafts we purchased were a mask set from Hobby Lobby and blank-page story books from Target. Those were my favorite things to do with my babies. It was so much fun seeing their creativity come alive and they were all proud of what they made.

“Someone opened it [door]. It was a ghost!”

Background Fillers

Think music, lights, dancing – all things that tend to create “noise” at a party and bulk up a simple spread. We had the Alexa going with some Halloween music and a Halloween movie (“Coraline”) playing so there was always something to do when the crafts were over or they just couldn’t sit still with one activity.

And The Total Is

Food and decorations cost us a whopping $67. Boo-yeah!

I’ve thrown many a party for my crew, and one thing I’ve learned is that it really doesn’t have to cost a ton of money to have a good time with your family. I hope these ideas helped and inspire you to have a spooky good time with your family! Happy Halloween!