Halloween 2026 for Kids: Costumes, Crafts, Wallpapers & Safety

Trick-or-treat safety checklist for parents

Run through this before anyone leaves the house on Halloween night. It takes two minutes and covers the things that most often go wrong.

• Stay with under-12s. Younger children should have an adult with them the whole way. Older children going out alone should stay in a group and agree the route and a time to be home before they leave.
• Choose face paint over a mask. A mask can slip and block a child's view of the road. If the costume needs one, check the eye holes are wide and ask the child to lift it while walking between houses.
• Check the costume length. Hems that drag are the most common cause of trips on dark steps and kerbs. Pin or hem anything that reaches past the ankle.
• Look for flame-resistant labels on capes, wigs and long sleeves, and keep loose fabric away from carved pumpkins with real candles in them.
• Use LED tea lights in pumpkins instead of real flames, especially where a lantern sits on a doorstep that children walk past.
• Add reflective tape to costumes and treat bags, and give every child a torch or a glow stick. Dark costumes are very hard to see from a car.
• Stick to streets you know that are well lit, and cross at corners rather than between parked cars.
• Only approach lit houses, and stay on the doorstep. Children should never go inside a house or into a car.
• Check every treat at home in good light before anything is eaten. Throw away anything unwrapped, homemade from a stranger, or already opened.
• Agree a meeting point in advance in case anyone gets separated, and make sure older children carry a charged phone.

Halloween party games you can set up at home

All of these work for a mixed age group and need almost nothing you do not already have in the house.

• Doughnut on a string. Hang doughnuts from a broom handle or washing line and let children eat them with hands behind their backs. Messy, and reliably the loudest game of the party.
• Mummy wrap. Split into pairs with a roll of toilet paper each. One child wraps the other from feet to shoulders. Fastest complete mummy wins.
• Pin the smile on the pumpkin. A Halloween version of pin the tail on the donkey. Draw a big pumpkin on chart paper and cut out paper mouths.
• Feel-the-guts boxes. Peeled grapes as eyeballs, cold cooked spaghetti as worms, dried apricots as ears. Children reach into a covered box and guess by touch alone.
• Monster freeze dance. Play music and call out a monster. Everyone dances as that monster and freezes when the music stops.
• Pumpkin bowling. Stand ten plastic bottles in a triangle and use a small pumpkin or a ball as the bowling ball.

Easy Halloween crafts for younger children

• Paper plate pumpkin. Paint a paper plate orange, add a green stem from card and glue on a cut-paper face. Suits children from about four.
• Tissue-paper ghost. Cover a scrunched ball of paper with a white tissue, tie a thread at the neck and draw two eyes. Hang a row of them in a doorway.
• Handprint bat. Paint both palms black, press them either side of a paper body, and add googly eyes. This one doubles as a keepsake.
• Jar lanterns. Glue orange tissue around a clean jam jar, add a paper face and drop an LED tea light inside. No flames near paper.

Why Halloween falls on 31 October

Halloween takes its date from the Christian calendar. 31 October is the eve of All Saints Day, which is kept on 1 November, and that evening was known as All Hallows Eve. Over centuries the name shortened to Halloween. Underneath that sits an older layer: the Celtic festival of Samhain, which marked the end of the harvest and the beginning of the dark half of the year, when the boundary between the living and the dead was believed to grow thin. Bonfires, disguises and food left out for wandering spirits all belong to that older festival, and they survive today as carved lanterns, costumes and trick-or-treating.

For the full story, read our history of Halloween and how the jack-o-lantern came to be carved from pumpkins, then test what you have learned with the Halloween quiz or the Halloween trivia pages.

Halloween questions parents and kids ask