Halloween won’t be the same this year. It’s a bummer because it’s our all-time favourite holiday. And this year is an extra special Halloween because it’s a full moon, it lands on a Saturday and it’s also when the clocks go back – giving us an extra hour at 2am. Out of all the holidays the pandemic has impacted, this one hurts the most. And while we are devastated by it, our hearts break for all the kids out there who won’t be able to trick or treat this year. Because there’s only so many years you can do it for, and it was our absolute favourite part of Halloween as kids. We would get jacked up on adrenaline and then coast on a sugar high. November 1 is maybe the saddest day of the year because it means waiting 364 days until next Halloween.
Under normal circumstances we’d be painting the town (blood) red on Halloween night. But, we’re gonna do our best to make some delicious lemonade out of these sour ass lemons we’ve been handed as a result of the pandemic. And then add some vodka to it, because that’s what we do.
We’re getting extra creative this year and thought we’d share our plans with you in case you’re inspired by them. We’re serving up three different ways to live your best Halloween life this October that we guarantee will be almost as fun as that huge costume party you were originally planning.
1) Host a Virtual Pumpkin Carving Competition
One of our favourite things to do every Halloween is carve pumpkins with friends. And we bet a lot of you feel the same. But, the good news is there’s a fun way to do this virtually, in a group big or small. Much like our virtual Chopped competition, we’ve developed some rules and regs for a virtual pumpkin carving competition. Because if you’re gonna carve pumpkins “together” online you might as well up the ante and make it a competition. Grab all the details here.
The month of October demands scary movies nights in. We’re usually planning a movie schedule with friends far in advance, trying to fit in as many possible – and making sure we know who’s bringing the snacks. Despite not being able to have big movie nights this year IRL, we’ve got the lowdown on how to shift movie night to the URL:
1) First up, pick a movie you all wanna watch. If you’re having trouble deciding you can always refer to our list of 31 favourite scary movies. We recommend one that everyone knows and loves so you can have a bit of banter without getting lost in the plot line or missing any dialogue.
2) Schedule a Zoom meeting and share the invite.
3) When everyone is logged in to the meeting and ready to get started, designate one person (we recommend whoever hosts the meeting) to play the movie on their screen (via a streaming app or disc drive) and then hit “Share Screen” and tap the window that’s playing the film. To ensure everyone can heat the dialogue, select “Share Computer Sound” at the bottom of the window. The only thing to note is that we found people had a different audio experience depending on their setup, so you may want to test the sound with one person first by having them dial in to the meeting early, and if the sound isn’t loud enough then you can always throw on the closed captioning too.
Want to take your screening up a notch one night? Make it a drinking game. All you need is to pick a movie, make a set of rules for when to drink and you’re ready to go. We recommend picking something classic everyone knows well. If you’re into this idea, we’ve even got a Halloween movie drinking game ready to make it easy for you: Hocus Pocus. You can grab the downloadable printout here (and if drinking games are your thing, check out our drinking games for Die Hard and Home Alone).
Who doesn’t love a good trivia night? We spent hours and hours developing fun, spooky Halloween trivia that will challenge just about anyone. It’s just the right level of difficulty to make it anyone’s game, and spans a number of different topics – from urban legends and folklore to movies, aliens, serial killers and everything in between. There’s fifty questions, making for a substantial night of guessing. Download our trivia sheets here and play with your household, or gather friends on a video chat. Also, we definitely recommend dressing up for this one!
Looking for other spooky activities, games or cocktails? Check out some of our other ideas and recipes below: