Halloween can be a tricky time for parents with teens. Once filled with excitement for costumes, treats, and family activities, teens may become embarrassed by Halloween traditions. It doesn’t have to be that way though! Green Halloween can help you reinvigorate your teen’s excitement for Halloween while also promoting a healthy and eco-friendly Halloween for all.

Bring emphasis to your table décor by utilizing CV Linens’ lavish selection of cheap table runner, are designed to be placed down in the middle of your table, to define your guest seating area as well as to create a stunning focal point to accentuate your centerpieces, table runners are an essential asset to tablescapes.

Instead of regular old trick-or-treating, suggest reverse trick-or-treating to your teen. The idea is that for every candy they receive at a house, they give a healthy, eco-friendly treat back and inform the household of the benefits of greening up Halloween. Rather than just going through the motions for candy, your teen may feel an added sense of purpose in going door to door to spread the green initiative. You can also try candy trading with your teen. Allow your teen a certain amount of candy to keep and offer incentives like DVDs, clothes, or something they’ve been pining for depending on how much candy they haul in. Programs like Halloween Candy Buy-Back will transfer your excess candy to Operation Gratitude, which sends the candy to troops overseas.

Your teen doesn’t want to trick-or-treat this year? That’s quite all-right, there are still plenty of Halloween activities teens enjoy. Why not host a scary movie marathon? Encourage your teen’s friends to bring healthy, eco-friendly snacks or even donations for charities like Change for Children or UNICEF. If you’re looking to attract a spectrum of ages, start out with a not-so-scary Halloween- themed movie and work your way up to a full-blown fright fest later on in the night. Another fun way for your teen to participate in the Halloween festivities is to create a haunted house in the front yard. Like the movie marathon, encourage donations and healthy snacks. Have your teen and his or her friends make spooky DIY costumes to frighten participants for a good cause!

Halloween doesn’t have to be boring for your teen. Talking to your teen about greening up Halloween can change their perspective on the holiday and give them a sense of purpose. Whether he or she decides to trick-or-treat for good, create a haunted house, host a scary movie marathon, or do something different like a air compressor guide by PAN, your teen will begin to re-embrace a holiday that they once cherished while also promoting green values and healthy living!

By Peter Piscia

For more family ideas follow us on Facebook facebook.com/greenhalloween or Twitter @greenhalloween

Photo: “Cocoa Beans” credit Rainforest Alliance

With Halloween just around the corner, it’s time to stock up on chocolates and sweet treats for the inevitable rush of trick-or-treaters. Ensure your holiday is scary in spirit, but easy on the environment with the Rainforest Alliance’s five tips to green your Halloween.

1)      Choose Rainforest Alliance Certified™ chocolate, such as by Endangered Species, for Halloween treats. Farmed on over 18 million acres of tropical land, some five million farmers rely on cocoa for their livelihoods. Unfortunately, many of these clear forests to expand their cocoa-growing lands. By choosing chocolate that features the green frog seal, you’re rewarding farmers that protect tropical forests and support the well-being of workers and local communities.

2)      Make terrifyingly tasty treats with Rainforest Alliance Certified chocolate, bananas and coffee. Check out our “Haunted Halloween Recipes” and visit our Shop the Frog page to find certified products near you.

3)      Teach your kids where their favorite chocolate treats come from and how they impact people, wildlife and the planet. Visit the Rainforest Alliance’s Kids’ Corner and play the online game Track it Back, to learn where chocolate comes from, where cocoa is grown and how it is harvested! Also visit our virtual rainforest, “Living in the Chocó Forests of Ecuador: The Chachi Cocoa Farmers.” (Brush up on your own knowledge about cocoa farming here.)

4)      Ensure your little trick-or-treater collects candy with a reusable bag.

5)      Instead of driving, walk your tick-or-treater around your local neighborhood. By walking, you are helping to save emissions, while also saving on your gas bill! It will also help to burn off the extra candy calories!

Keep it up! Supporting an eco-friendly lifestyle should be a daily event, not an occasional act. With a little thought, and some guidance from the Rainforest Alliance, you can easily apply these green Halloween tips to your everyday life.

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The Rainforest Alliance works with people whose livelihoods depend on the land, helping them transform the way they grow food, harvest wood and host travelers. From large multinational corporations to small, community-based cooperatives, businesses and consumers worldwide are involved in the Rainforest Alliance’s efforts to bring responsibly produced goods and services to a global marketplace where the demand for sustainability is growing steadily. For more information, visit www.rainforest-alliance.org.

by Corey

Clearly, it’s dangerous to be alive. The news proves it daily. Even without a t.v., terrifying stories grab hold of my consciousness and fuel my neurotic tendencies via my smart phone, at the grocery store check-out, and in the parking lot of my kids’ school (“Did you hear what happened…? Soooo scary!”

But somehow the fear factor is amplified at Halloween, and tales of horror-in-real-life seem to multiply like bunnies in springtime. Only not as cute.

Now, we all know that much of the spook-fest prompted by the media is simply motivated by ratings; apparently, Wes Craven and the likes are on to something (who knew?). Fear sells. But it’s also true that some of it is really, truly real and really, truly scary. And some of it is important to be aware (aka: beware!) of.

But how not to turn concern into freeze or freak out? How to feel better about better-for-people-and-planet steps?

Since it’s launch in 2007, Green Halloween has been all about creating meaningful change through fun; about healthier holidays without the yuck; greener steps that are easy. No finger wagging, preaching, or in-your-face tactics. We don’t believe that fear is as motivating as joy, as yum and as simple. And you’ve told us you agree.

But at the same time, Green Halloween has always focused on addressing serious health and environmental concerns like heavy metals in face paints, candy made with junk instead of real food, and waste generated by decor, candy and costumes as well as the packaging from all the aforementioned. The reasons Green Halloween matters (in addition to the yum and the fun, which matter a lot) are far too numerous.

Take these recent headlines:

• Lead-Contaminated Halloween Costumes Shipped to Seattle (King 5 News, Seattle)
• French Bees Produce Blue honey After Eating M&M Waste (BBC, UK)
• The Toxic Truth About Sugar (International Weekly Journal of Science)
• Do Food Dyes Warrant a Warning Label? (Healthy Child, Healthy World)
• Lead, Cadmium, and Other Toxic Chemicals Found in Costume Jewelry (Yahoo.com)
• Nestle Chocolate is Produced From Child Labor, New Report Says (Global Post)
• Genetically Modified Candy! (InsidersHealthTV)

I don’t know about you, but all of this is concerning in my book.

But as we already established, fear is about as inspiring as a rotten pumpkin, so it’s important to counter dread-filled headlines with do-able, affordable, feel-good solutions. Otherwise, we’ll all end up looking like the sorry soul in Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream.

Green Halloween is the antidote to gloom and doom. And we make it easy-breezy.

And because you, and people all around you, refuse to “freeze” from fear, and instead embrace the possibility that Halloween can be healthy and tasty, non-toxic and cool, sustainable and affordable, eco-fabulous and fun, good news is now front page:

• Hershey to Source 100% Certified Cocoa by 2020 (PR Newswire)
• Whole Foods Drops Hershey’s Scharffen Berger Chocolates Over Child Labor Issues (Green America)
• Surf Sweets Organic Candy and EcoMom Alliance Team Up to Bring Waste-Free Party Kits to Schools (EcoMom Alliance)
• New Candy Company Launches With Aim of Unjunking the World (PR Newswire)
• Terra Firma Cosmetics Launches First Line of Truly Non-Toxic Face Paints
• ChicoBag Celebrates 5th Annual Reusable Halloween Bag Design Contest
• Hunterdon County Costume Swap a Great Success (Hunterton County Democrat)
• Green Halloween Costumes 2012: Easy, Free DIY Ideas For Kids And Adults (The Huffington Post)
• National Costume Swap Day: Event Aims To Help Parents Save On Kids’ Halloween Costumes (The Huffington Post)

Have some good news to share about greening Halloween? Do share!

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Lynn Colwell and Corey Colwell-Lipson are mother and daughter and authors of  Celebrate Green! Creating Eco-Savvy Holidays, Celebrations and Traditions for the Whole Family, and founders of Green Halloween®.

Halloween is a really fun tradition and as all you Green Halloween fans know, it can celebrated in ways that are good for our bodies and for the earth! It’s so fun to get dressed up and live in a world of make believe for a day! The scary party might just be all the candy and junk food that most likely has made its way into your house. I think Halloween is the perfect time to show parents that when junk food is in the house it’s hard not to eat it…this is the same all year long…it just gets amplified on this day! If you keep all the candy and treats just pay attention to how much harder it is resist. It’s an excellent example of why healthy eating is so much easier if you don’t bring tempting junk food into the house!

Need ideas for getting the candy out of the house?  Here are 10:

1. Give your kids a chance to choose their favorite treats and give them one per day for a week.
2. Have a visit from the switch witch and trade the candy for a toy or maybe some money. There is even a book about the Switch Witch!  Or maybe a Candy Fairy can come for a visit!
3. Find out if a dentist in your area is taking candy in exchange for toys. There are many dentists that offer this buy back type of service! Halloween Candy Buy Back!
4. Send candy to soldiers…just Google that phrase and you’ll find quite a few sites with information such as Operation Gratitude.
5. Take some to nursing homes or women’s shelters.
6. Do some baking with some of those sweets and share with your neighbors.
7. Save some to decorate your Gingerbread houses at Christmas time!
8. Turn it into a science experiment.
9. Give some to the grandparents, grown up cousins that are “too old” to trick or treat, or to aunts and uncles that don’t have kids!
10. Take it to work!  If you work from home do one of the above or else you’ll probably find yourself “snacking” more often than you’d like!

So enjoy the festivities, have some sweets and then be sure to feed your families extra fruits and veggies to help your bodies process it all! Perhaps make these Rainbow Fruit sticks!

 
Happy Healthy Halloween!

Kia

Kia Robertson is a mom and the creator of the Today I Ate A Rainbow kit; a tool that helps parents establish healthy habits by setting the goal of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day. Kia is passionate about creating tools that help parents raise healthy kids!

At our daughter’s school each class has a Halloween party.  They pick four families to bring a “treat” and four families to bring something healthy!  Last year our family was asked to bring in a healthy treat for our daughter’s class party so we found this great and easy to make Vegetable Skeleton. I wasn’t sure how popular it would be up next to all the sweet treats but I was pleasantly surprised at the end of the day to see that the tray was pretty much empty…just 3 mushrooms left AND there were still plenty of cakes and cookies left uneaten!!!

Here is the picture my husband took of our veggie skeleton!

This is all it takes to make a veggie skeleton:

• Head of cabbage or iceberg lettuce
• Zucchini slices (rounds)
• Bell Pepper slices (cross-cut)
• Celery stalks
• Sugar snap peas
• Carrots (peeled)
• Broccoli florets
• Cauliflower florets
• Cherry/Grape Tomatoes
• Healthy dressing of your choice!
• Olive slices

Directions:

Step 1. Line half of small bowl with lettuce for the skeleton’s hair; fill with dressing. Place at one end of large tray or baking sheet for the skeleton’s head.

Step 2. Arrange vegetables on tray to resemble skeleton’s body

* We added the fake spiders for a little extra fun

Halloween parties can have a balance of sweets and health…by spending a little extra time you can make veggies just as fun as any junk food!

Happy Healthy Eating,
Kia

Kia Robertson is a mom and the creator of the Today I Ate A Rainbow kit; a tool that helps parents establish healthy habits by setting the goal of eating a rainbow of fruits and vegetables every day. Kia is passionate about creating tools that help parents raise healthy kids!