Happy Halloween! Customs, costumes, snack ideas and Co.

Why do we celebrate Halloween?

Halloween is celebrated every year on October 31st. Since this is the night before All Saints’ Day, the festival is also known as All Hallows Eve.
The History of Halloween originally began with the Celtic culture. Unlike today, when there are four seasons, the Celts only knew summer and winter.
While the summer reflected the joy of life, the winter was directly related to the topic of death. This change of seasons took place exactly on October 31st and was celebrated with the festival of Samhain.

At that time it was believed that death could haunt you on that day. To prevent this, the Celts dressed up spookily to pretend to be dead and by that escape the danger. Irish emigrants brought this custom to the United States in the 19th century.

In the meantime, the tradition of Halloween was also spread to other regions of the world and became an indispensable part of our culture.

Fast and cheap Halloween costumes DIY

Costumes can be expensive. Often you decide to spontaneously celebrate Halloween night at home or go to a Halloween party. If you want to save time and money, you can easily make some costumes by yourself.

These are the best cheap costume ideas that can be made within minutes:

Zombie: This costume is easy and cheap to make by yourself. All you need is a white t-shirt or some other fabric that you can design spooky. For example, you can paint stains with fake blood, mud or cocoa on the fabric to give it a creepy look. For the face paint it is recommended to use white make-up and to apply a dark eye make-up. Here you can also use artificial blood, for example to draw scars.

Money Heist: The famous outfit from the Netflix series Money Heist is ideal as a costume idea. You only need red sports uniforms and a Salvador Dali mask, which you can order online. The advantage of this is that the outfit is perfect as a group costume and also requires very little effort.

Skeleton: For this costume you only need black clothes, cardboard boxes, scissors and glue. Just cut out bone-like shapes from white cardboard boxes. Then you attach them in the form of a skeleton onto the black clothes. Done!

Mummy: The mummy costume can also be made quickly and with little money. To do this, you cut or tear light-colored old sheets into strips and glue or sew them onto your clothes in a mummy look. For an authentic appearance you can make this costume look older with mud, cocoa powder or coffee powder. If you do not have an old sheet, you can also use toilet paper or discarded t-shirts.

Ghost: The classy costume when things have to be done quickly and you only have a few materials at home. Draw eyes and a mouth on an old white sheet and cut out the contours. The basic version of the costume is already done! For the details you can cut a jagged pattern into the hemline of the sheet and draw a spider on it with a black marker.

Jack-o’-lantern

Jack-o’-lantern is not only a fun activity, but also results in beautiful decoration for your house and garden. For this purpose, it is best to use large pumpkins and regular kitchen knives or cutter knives for carving. For scooping out the pumpkin you can use a spoon.

Jack-o’-lantern in 5 steps:

• Draw the pumpkin face with a permanent marker.
• Cut off the lid, but do not remove the stem, so that the pumpkin can be opened more easily later on.
• Cut with the knife along the drawn lines.
• Scoop out the pumpkin with a spoon.
• Place a candle or a chain of lights inside the pumpkin.

Trick-or-treating

Following the motto ‘trick or treat’, dressed up Halloween fans walk from house to house to ask for candy. If they do not receive any, they play small pranks on the house owner. So be prepared and always have candy at your house when kids knock on your door at Halloween!

Halloween Snack Ideas

If you’re planning a Halloween party, apart from candy corn and soul cakes, spooky finger food is also a must:
With these ideas your Halloween party will be horribly beautiful:

• Mummy dogs: One of the most popular Halloween snacks and so easy to make! All you need is sausages, dough, a little bit of mustard and candy eyes. Cut the dough into stripes and wrap it around the sausages one by one. Then bake it for around 12 minutes. Afterwards put two mustard dots at the top of the sausages and stick the candy eyes on it. Done!
• Spaghetti spiders: All you need for this snack idea are mini sausages and spaghetti. First, you break the spaghetti in two and pierce four of them through one sausage. The sausages represent the body of the spider and the spaghetti its legs. Then cook the combinations for about 15 minutes. The scary spiders are perfectly shown to their best in a tomato sauce.
• Banana Ghosts: These are ideal as a snack for in between. For this, you pierce halved bananas on a straw or on a wooden skewer. For the white robe of the ghosts, dress the bananas in light chocolate. Depending on your taste, coconut rasps can also be added onto the bananas. What should not be forgotten, is a creepy ghost face. You can either use chocolate eyes from the baking department or simply draw them yourself with melted chocolate.
• Apple dentures: This is one of the fastest recipe ideas. All you need are apples, peanut butter and marshmallows or almonds. Cut the apples into slices and place two of them on top of each other, just like a set of dentures. Then apply peanut butter on the inside of the apple bits. As teeth, marshmallows or almond pieces are placed side by side between the apple slices.

Halloween Movies

To make the scary evening perfect, creepy horror movies or TV shows are a must.
Well-known films are amongst others:

• Halloween (1978), a US-American film directed by John Carpenter with the characters Michael Myers, Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode and the psychiatrist Dr. Loomis
• Halloween Box Office Mojo (October 2018)
• Scream (1996)

Our tip

If you own a lot of Halloween costumes or decoration articles, you can be very happy on October 31. Unfortunately, these need relatively much storage space in the apartment for the remaining days of the year.

If you want to create some space at home, feel free to store your Halloween items in a storage room at BOXIE24 during this time. For smaller items it is worth renting boxes at a reasonable price, so that the items are optimally protected until next year.