My Favorite Halloween Traditions at Home: The Little Things That Make October Feel Special

Wolf Homestead

Sep 22

7 min read

Updated: Oct 17

Halloween has always been one of those holidays I look forward to because it is not just about one day for us. It is basically a whole season. The decorations go up, the weather finally starts cooling down after a hot Southern summer, we start watching the movies we have seen a hundred times, and there is a lot more time spent at home together under blankets. That is the part I love most.

Our traditions have changed a little over the years, especially after moving from Pennsylvania to South Carolina and starting our family compound on our land, but Halloween is still centered around the same things for us: family, decorating, being outside, making memories with the kids, and finding ways to have fun without spending a fortune.

Halloween Has a Set Spot on Our Decorating Calendar

I am absolutely one of those people who has a schedule for seasonal decorations. September is fall. Then the first weekend before October starts, the fall decorations come down and Halloween goes up. In November, fall comes back out with the Thanksgiving decorations. Black Friday means Christmas is going up, and when January gets here, the winter decorations take over.

We decorate the main living areas of the house—the kitchen, living room, dining room and main bathroom. Outside gets decorated for every season and holiday too. I love how something as simple as changing decorations can make the whole house feel different. It is one of those little things that makes being home feel special to me.

Pumpkin Carving Is a Family Event

We have always carved pumpkins together as a family, but since starting our compound with our family, it has turned into an even bigger tradition. Now we try to find a weekend before Halloween when everyone has some free time, get together as a whole compound, and carve or paint pumpkins together.

There is no perfect date or complicated plan. We just pick a weekend that works for everybody and make a day out of it. Some pumpkins end up cute, some end up creepy, some end up looking absolutely nothing like the picture somebody was trying to copy—and that is half the fun.

The Halloween Movies We Watch Every Year

Halloween movies are a must. Hocus Pocus is obviously on the list, along with The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Addams Family and Beetlejuice. We also keep an eye out for whatever new Halloween movies come out on Netflix each year because there is always room to add another one to the rotation. Coco is absolutely on that list too, and we pretty much have to watch every Disney Halloween movie we can find. Old favorites, newer ones, animated ones—if Disney made it for Halloween, there is a very good chance it ends up on our TV sometime in October.

This is probably one of my favorite parts of the season. Once the weather cools off, there is nothing better than being home, grabbing blankets, putting on a Halloween movie and actually slowing down for a while.

Football Season Is Part of Fall for Us Too

By the time Halloween rolls around, football mode is in full effect around our compound. We love watching football together during football season. Everybody makes some kind of food, we pile onto the couches, veg out, cheer on our team, and spend the day together.

That is the best kind of family time to me—good food, football, everybody together, and nowhere else we need to be. Fall just would not feel the same without those weekends mixed in with all the decorating, movies, crafts, and Halloween fun.

Hunting Season Is Another Fall Tradition

Football season may have us piled on the couch, but hunting season gets our whole compound pulling the camo back out and heading for the deer stands. It is another one of those fall things that brings our family together. They hunt to put food in the freezers, so it is not just about being outdoors or the excitement of the season. It is time spent together, providing for our families, and filling the freezer with meat we know exactly where it came from. And of course who get the best deer of the season!

Cheap Halloween Crafts Are Usually the Most Fun

We love doing crafts with the kids for every holiday. Sometimes it is something inexpensive we find at Dollar General, and sometimes it is a DIY made from whatever we already have around the house. It does not have to be fancy to turn into a good memory.

Our kids especially love sticker crafts for each holiday, but Halloween ones are always fun because there really are no rules. You can make them cute, ridiculous, spooky or completely weird. They LOVE them! Halloween is one of the few times a crooked face and mismatched eyeballs actually make the craft better.

Trick-or-Treating in South Carolina Became a New Favorite

Trick-or-treating has been amazing since we moved to South Carolina. Our town puts on a big event every year where they shut down blocks of the main street so the kids can trick-or-treat safely, and there are fun activities set up right in the middle of the road too.

Moving meant leaving behind traditions we had for years, so finding a new community tradition that the kids look forward to has meant a lot. It is one of those things that made our new home start feeling like home sweet home.

Even the Goats and Chickens Get Pumpkins

Of course, because this is our house, the animals cannot be left out of Halloween. We always get pumpkins for the goats and chickens too. The kids get to carve pumpkins for them, and then the animals get their own Halloween treat.

It is such a simple thing, but it combines two things we love—holiday traditions and our animals. Watching goats investigate a pumpkin like it personally offended them before they finally decide to eat it is entertainment all by itself.

Our Church Trunk-or-Treat Now Includes Goats

Last year we did trunk-or-treat with our church for the first time, and we definitely found a tradition we want to keep. We made our setup look like a barn with a sign that said “Beware of Goats,” and we actually brought two of our goats with us (Stitch and Poppy, pictured below) for the kids to see and love on.

It was one of those ideas that sounded fun when we planned it and ended up being even better in real life, Stitch went home early though he was a bit too excited to stay calm haha. The kids loved the goats, the goats got plenty of attention, and it felt completely us. We will absolutely keep doing that one each year.

We All Dress Up—But We Try Not to Spend a Fortune

Our whole family dresses up for Halloween. We usually try to pick a theme and then figure out how to pull it off as cheaply as possible. I love a good themed costume, but I do not love the idea of spending a ridiculous amount of money on outfits we are probably wearing for one night.

A lot of the fun is figuring out what we can reuse, make ourselves or piece together inexpensively. Sometimes the budget version ends up being funnier and more memorable anyway.

We Had to Find a New Fall Festival Tradition Too

When our two oldest kids (Kaliyah and AJ) were little and we still lived in Pennsylvania, we went to the Apple Harvest Festival every year.

We all loved it, so when we moved South, finding something that gave us that same kind of fall day was important to us.

We found Sara's Farm Adventure, and it has become our Southern version of that tradition. It is such a fun place for us, and of course the fact that there are even more animals to see and enjoy—animals we do not already have on our own farm—makes it even better.

Why I Love Halloween So Much

For me, Halloween is really about the feeling of the season. I love the decorations. I love the family time. I love that the weather finally cools down after the hot Southern summer. I love having more reasons to stay home, slow down, pile up under blankets and watch Halloween movies together.

None of our traditions are complicated. Most of them are not expensive either. They are just things we keep doing year after year because the kids remember them, we enjoy them, and they make the season feel like ours. That is really what I want every holiday to feel like—not perfect, not expensive, just special enough that everybody looks forward to doing it again next year.

The Best Traditions Are the Ones You Actually Want to Repeat

If there is one thing I have learned, it is that you do not need a giant holiday bucket list to make Halloween memorable. Pick the things your family genuinely enjoys and keep doing them. Carve the pumpkins. Watch the same movie again. Make the cheap craft. Wear the ridiculous family costume. Take the goats to trunk-or-treat if that is your kind of normal.

Those are the things our kids are going to remember, and they are the things I know I will miss one day when everybody is grown and busy. So for now, we are going to keep decorating every room, carving way too many pumpkins, dressing up together and making October feel like Halloween for as long as we can.