Our Annual Family Halloween Dinner

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If I’m being perfectly honest, Halloween was never something that was enormously important to me as a kid. I remember feeling relieved in some ways when I aged out of the whole costume-and-trick-or-treating thing. But there’s something about your own kids being over the moon about it that makes me feel super excited, too! So I knew I wanted to come up with a few traditions around the holiday that were fun for me, too. And my favorite is our annual family Halloween dinner.

When do we do our family Halloween dinner?

For the past several years, we’ve done a family Halloween dinner a few days before the holiday itself. While it’s fun to have a meal together that day, it always feels like we’re in a rush to get out the door. Plus, we’ve gotten Boorito from Chipotle on Halloween night for close to a decade!

So we started doing a special dinner a few days in advance (usually the weekend before if Halloween falls on a weekday). It’s such a fun way to get excited for the big day!

What do we do for our Halloween dinner with kids?

Since this was something I wanted our family to do for a long time, I knew I needed to keep it fairly simple and manageable. We start by setting an easy but festive table, with tall candles and perhaps some cotton spider webs acting as a runner down the tabletop. We also set out Halloween dinnerware. We used to have melamine Halloween plates, but those fell apart this year. So we’ll probably do something like this and set them on top of our normal white plates.

Then we try to set the mood with a few other basics. We always get dry ice – the effect can’t be beat! We usually just pour root beer over it. We also dim the lights and play some spooky music over the Google Nest mini.

What do we eat for a family Halloween meal?

This is the most fun part! I love how the food goes beyond just sustenance and becomes part of the decor and atmosphere! It’s so fun. Here are some favorites of ours for our Halloween dinner:

Mandarin orange pumpkins
Banana ghosts
Apple and peanut butter teeth
Mummy brie (my kids are obsessed with brie so they love this!)
Ghost string cheese
Apple slices with caramel (I can’t stand biting into a whole huge caramel apple. I much prefer this! Here’s my favorite, dead simple caramel sauce recipe, and I love this thin apple slicer.)
Halloween veggie tray
Pasta brains with mozzarella ball eyeballs (I get the little round mozzarella balls and stick tiny pieces of olive in them)
Mac o lantern and cheese (my kids thought these were soooo fun last year)
Apple cider or Root beer over dry ice
Jiggly hand-shaped Jell-O