Family Halloween Costumes and Truffula Tree Treats

Have you chosen Halloween costumes yet for this year?

If you have been paying attention, you already know what my family will be this Halloween. We have a long-established tradition of dressing up as a family. I guess it is a little more work in the planning-stages, but we all love it! We sit around the dinner table “casting” ourselves as different characters from books, movies, TV shows, and deciding who should be who.

I love it when I see other families dressing up together as well or putting a clever twist on their Halloween costumes. I have a popular Pinterest board dedicated to my favorite costume finds. If you love the idea of family costumes, but not the hassle of coming up with them, you’ll want to look at the beautiful options available at Pottery Barn Kids this year…

Appropriately spooky witches, wolves, and owls come in family options.

And for clever groupings, I’m loving the bee and bee-keeper combo for a mom and baby!

Or what could be more fun than an entire family of Dr. Seuss characters?

They even have corresponding treat bags, which happen to be on sale right now.

There are almost enough Dr. Seuss Pottery Barn costumes for my entire family–wouldn’t Thing 1 and Thing 2 be so perfect for twins! If we didn’t already have our costumes for this year, this could be so fun!

Another tradition I have is to carry our family costume theme through to the treats we hand out or the way we decoration our trunk for the church “Trunk or Treat”. The year the we were dressed as the family circus, we decorated the trunk like a spooky big top and I told fortunes while BSB made balloon animals. The year that we were the characters from the Wizard of Oz, we handed out lollipops in honor of the Lollipop Guild, of course!

I think the perfect treat for a Seuss-ical family would be Truffula trees! All you need are some black and white straws and cotton candy!

I did these two different ways, but both are pretty easy. I couldn’t decide which straws looked the most authentic. The birch or the striped straws, but in the end, my Truffula tree forest had a combo of 3 kinds of straws, which made it look all the more Seuss-ical to me.

First you need a base where you can create your forest and hold your trees until you hand them out. I just used a piece of styrofoam and covered it with a piece of plastic tablecloth with a grass pattern (recycled from the Earth Day birthday we had this year–but haven’t blogged yet). Then I simply stuck toothpicks in the foam at regular intervals. I experimented with two kinds of cotton candy. The candy corn tub came from the Dollar Store, and goes pretty far. We have our own cotton candy machine that I found at Target on clearance while preparing for the County Fair birthday.

If using the machine, you simply use the straws instead of the typical cones. With the store bought candy, you just shape it around the end of the straw. It can look a little more spiky that way (more like the illustrations), but be careful not to smoosh it down too much or it gets hard. Also, you can’t get away with doing these too much in advance, unless you seal them in plastic baggies. Heat and or moisture in the air will cause the candy to disintegrate after a while. There is a lady in our neighborhood who pulls out the popcorn machine and makes and serves popcorn all night to the trick-or-treaters. You could do the same with a cotton candy machine.

So which version do you think looks most like a Truffula tree?

Arial view of the forest.

And here is at least one little ghoul who would be very excited to devour her own truffula tree.

I’ve got a few more Halloween costume posts and ideas coming down the line. I’d love to hear what your plans are!

Thanks to Pottery Barn Kids for sponsoring this post and kick-starting my  Halloween insanity for the year!