The last things that our boys expected to be able to do in China was to go trick or treating for Halloween. Besides leaving behind friends and family, this was probably in their minds, one of the top sacrifices they were making in following their parents’ dreams for our family to move to China. Well, today we proved that with a little creativity, we can still do Halloween.

Using the Cricut Explore Air 2 and some cardstock paper, the boys helped their mom make a bunch of Halloween decorations. Here are some photos of our door all decked out with bats, spiders and jack-o-lanterns.

We bought two huge bags of candy at our neighbourhood corner store for approximately 100 RMB ($20 CAD). The assortment included gummies, lollipops, gum, jelly, mini cakes and cookies. They even had these fantastic eye ball gummies, perfect for Halloween!

We then invited some neighbourhood kids to join us for our own version of trick or treating at our apartment building.

Since one boy had no costume, I enlisted my 13 year old son’s help to make him a costume. This was a great project that my son could get ADST credit for homeschooling. We gave the boy a few costume ideas and he decided that he wanted an airplane costume. My son used poster paper and cardboard to make wings that would be strapped to the boy’s back. Water bottles were transformed into jet engines with aluminum foil. He used orange and yellow construction paper to make the flames that were stapled back to back and fit over the bottom of the water bottles. He looked up the China Air Force symbol and used construction paper to create that on the back side of the wings. The end result was not too shabby.

Today we set up our Cricut machine once again, and set to work on some paper window decorations. Our plan was to use our dark apartment building staircase for the “trick or treating.” Each level had a window ledge where we could place some candy. I thought it would be a bit more of a work out for the kids to have to climb up the stairs to get the candy on each level.

It was a total success! The kids had a blast. And the little boy loved his airplane costume. Ok, maybe he loved the candy more.