Tips from Mumsnet, the online forum for parents

HOW TO DEAL WITH TRICK-OR-TREATERS

Give out tangerines. Little kids won’t mind, their parents will be relieved – and teenagers won’t come back. Try apples. Word gets around. After three years nobody bothers us any more. I left a bowl of sweets outside and stuck a sign up saying: ‘New baby asleep. Knock and I’ll flay you alive… but help yourself to a sweetie.’ No one knocked. My broomstick at the door and a sign saying ‘sacrifice volunteers, please ring bell’ normally does the trick. Put out a basket with a sign on it saying: ‘We’ve gone out, but do help yourselves to these’ – but leave the basket empty. A kid turned up not dressed as anything, so we told him to at least put his jumper over his head and pretend to be a headless ghost. That’s when he ran away. Shut the curtains, turn off the lights, sit in the dark and pretend you’re out. Move to an area with an average age of 70. When the doorbell rings, squirt instant cream around dog’s mouth and open the door shouting ‘RABID DOG, RABID DOG!’ Clears devils, bats and witches in seconds.

TIPS FOR PARTIES

Make “monster hands” by stuffing clear plastic disposable gloves with popcorn that has been shaken in green food colouring. Use UV lightbulbs to make white things glow in the dark. Try “floating ghosts” – balloons draped in crepe paper, suspended from the ceiling on invisible thread. Fill a hollowed-out pumpkin with red jelly. Leave to set until it’s gloopy – then add lollipops. Tell trick-or-treaters to root inside the pumpkin brains for their treats. Make worms in dirt: Essentially chocolate custard with gummy worms, topped with crumbled-up chocolate biscuits. Freeze plastic bugs or gummy sweets in ice cubes.

Cut bread into ghost shapes, spread with cream cheese and use raisins for eyes. Make “witches brew” by adding mint ice-cream to green limeade. It’ll foam up gruesomely. Icy hands: freeze water dyed with green food colouring in a rubber glove. Once frozen, cut glove off and use hand to chill punch. Tear hot dogs in half and make slashes near the torn end for knuckles. Cut off a sliver of the other end to be the fingernail bed and add a blob of ketchup for the nail. If serving in buns, dollop ketchup at the torn end too!

GROSS GAMES

Pass the casket: make a casket-shaped box, with lid, out of cardboard and fill with treats. When the music stops the holder can reach in and get a prize. Broken bones: cut out skeleton parts from white paper. Punch holes where joints should be. Kids can assemble them using split pins. Pin the nose on the witch: swap a donkey and tail for an old hag and a hooter. Foul feelings: fill hollowed-out pumpkins with a variety of slimy, furry, yucky stuff – pumpkin seeds and peach slices work well. Blindfold kids and get them to guess the contents by touch only. Wrap the mummy: partner children up. Give one child a roll of loo paper to wrap the other up in. Petrified piñata: make a ghost-shaped piñata out of papier-mâché in the weeks before. Ditch the witch: decorate large plastic bottles as witches and use as bowling pins, with a small pumpkin for the ball. Compiled by Abigail Flanagan

Do it properly and it’s great

The British have missed the point of Hallowe’en entirely. They just don’t get it. Christmas is for kids, Valentine’s Day is for grown-ups, but (take it from me, an American) Hallowe’en is for everyone, and if you get it right, it’s the best party of the year. After all, who doesn’t like fancy dress?

Having exported it to the US in the first place, the UK has now reimported it – but does it all wrong. No one learns the rules, consequently no one has any idea of what to expect. Most people aren’t even sure which day it happens!

I know the British have a thing about maintaining a sense of eccentricity and individuality, but a herd mentality is necessary to make October 31 work. Rule one: stock up on sweets. A lighted jack-o’-lantern is the universal symbol that you are home and expecting trick or treaters. If you don’t want kids buzzing your door, forgo any decorations, pull the curtains and turn off your lights. (We had neighbours who parked their car around the corner and hid in the basement.) Kids know that the better their costume, the more generous the spoils, so they go all-out. Anyone over 12 has to be wearing a stunning outfit, if they are not to be turned away – just take it with a grain of salt that your house will be pelted with eggs later. Most importantly, trick or treating ends by 9pm.

Here, however, a slapdash and lacklustre system has evolved, with adults being stingy with the sweets and kids turning up in street clothes. Without a community effort, you might as well not bother.

MICHELLE HENERY

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