We love fall activities! We share a lot of them every year on this blog. As days draw shorter, it can be harder to keep our spirits up, and we slowly draw into ourselves. Fall activities, crafts and events can help us connect to others.
The fall holiday season is just kicking off. All over social media, we’re seeing pictures of gourds and fall displays. The trees are certainly decorating themselves for fall! We love fall crafts. Health is about the mind and body. Fostering your hobbies and relationships is so crucial to remaining healthy and happy.
Recently, we’ve been seeing a trend everywhere. Halloween or “spooky” baskets are trendy this year. We have seen posts of decorated Halloween buckets filled with goodies and treats splashed over blogs. They’re like Easter baskets, only Halloween-themed. Some suggest doing it in place of trick-or-treating while the pandemic is ongoing. But, others suggest giving them to kids in your family in the morning and then reusing them for trick-or-treating, so it’s not an either-or. Some blogs tell you to make them for your neighbors and leave them outside their door to surprise them with a note saying, “You’ve Been Booed!”
No one on our social media team has young children, but we reached out to parents to get their opinion on the baskets. Halloween is a wonderful holiday in that it really is for kids. As adults, it’s lovely to see kids in costumes, having fun. Opening the door to trick-or-treaters is a thrill, and it’s always a pleasure to see them dressed up. We wondered what parents thought of this new tradition. What we heard, over and over again, were a few things. The first was that it added more expense to the day and commercialized it in a way they didn’t like. The second was that it was another project when parents are already busy helping kids with costumes. The third was that the baskets added more sugar into the day. And the fourth was that the baskets weren’t part of their own beloved traditions. They had traditions that they wanted to share with their kids that they felt would be pushed aside for these baskets.
One mother said, “I don’t want to start doing this and then every year have that one compared to the year’s before. I have enough going on with back-to-school, the holidays coming up and everything else. I don’t need this on top of it.”
After speaking to parents, we saw an important lesson: a craft shouldn’t be forced. This brand new “tradition” seems to have cropped up overnight. If you love crafts, this can certainly be a fun way to spend an afternoon. It’s a great way to give a seasonal gift to a child in your life, a friend, neighbor or family member. Everyone loves knowing that someone is thinking of them! But, these blogs that write about it as though it’s somehow a routine and “must do” part of the holiday might put undue pressure on you.
Crafts should be fun! A gift like a Halloween basket can be thoughtful and a neat project. But, if it’s not something that seems like a great project to you, don’t believe the hype: this isn’t a must-do. Holiday crafts should be about enjoying yourself, not a pretty picture on social media and ticking off a box on a checklist! We love a lot of fall trends, but you can give this one a miss if it seems like it’s going to be more onerous and expensive than fun.
