Celebrating Halloween with Very Young Children

If you're throwing a Halloween party for children from preschool through 3rd grade, keep the decorations and costumes fun and spooky. Purposely scaring a very young child is downright mean and immature. Buy the good witch and ghost costumes, and decorate with a lot of smiling jack-o-lanterns. Young children especially like to dress up as their favorite TV cartoon characters. Girls love to dress up as princesses. Boys like to dress up as action heros like Spider Man or Bat Man.

Read age appropriate Halloween stories to them, and the same goes for watching Halloween movies.

Check out Amazon for some great costumes for this age group.

I loved doing fun things for the holidays and special occasions with my children. Hopefully, you're a kid at heart and will enjoy doing these activities with your kids too:

• Let them help make cupcakes or cookies and a bowl of orange frosting. Fill small bowls with decorations such as M&Ms, licorice bits and candy corn.
• Help them make trick-or-treat bags and decorate them.
• Using black construction paper, they can make a long chain and string it all over the house as a decoration.
• Find Halloween clip art on the Internet. Have the kids color picture and display them all over the house.
• Read age appropriate Halloween stories to them. I've listed some children's favorites from Amazon below.

I enjoyed baking from scratch, and the kids enjoyed helping me. I would measure out the ingredients and let them pour them in the bowl. The other alternative is to buy a cake mix to make the cupcakes. You could also make red velvet cupcakes, and use a different color food coloring such as orange. To make black, mix equal amounts of red, yellow and blue. Experiment around to get the darkness you want.

I've always made butter cream   frosting from a recipe I keep in my head:

• Softened butter or margarine
• Powdered sugar
• Vanilla
• Milk

Mix the butter, powdered sugar and vanilla together. To get the frosting to the consistency you want, add just a dash of milk at a time. How much of each ingredient depends on how large a batch of frosting you want. For a small batch, try these measurements and adjust for larger batches:

• 1/4-- cup butter
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1 teas. vanilla
• Dash of milk

You can also use other flavorings instead of vanilla. Make some black cupcakes with orange frosting or orange cupcakes with black frosting. The kids will love it.