Hobbies: This Halloween, it’s in the bag

Ask any kid from ages 5-15 what they are going to be for Halloween, and most of them will already have an answer. Halloween is any child’s dream holiday, with a perfect storm of costumes, candy and a free pass to trick their family and friends.

As much as most kids love dressing up for Halloween, the real trick is getting to show off their costumes at a party, or when trick-or-treating from house to house, while collecting loads of Halloween candy along the way.

There is ample time to enlist the kids’ help in the design of a bag to hold their Halloween goodies. Canvas tote bags are available at any craft store for less than $5 and can be stored flat and reused every October. And decorating the bags? Well, that’s the fun part. It’s easy to cut out black felt bats and spiders to decorate a white bag and white felt ghosts, skeletons and mummies to embellish a black bag.

Canvas bags come in several sizes and can always be filled with other things to decorate the house until Oct. 31. Stuff a bag with multiple pumpkins to set by the front door or on the front porch, or fill a bag with orange and yellow boas for a wickedly unique decoration until it is time to take it trick-or-treating.

If you want to recycle the bag into a new use, like holding groceries at the store, simply cut the Halloween-themed shapes out of self-adhesive felt. It is also available at craft stores and can easily be removed once the holiday is past, because there’s really nothing tricky about it. Once the shapes have been pulled from the bag, you will have a blank canvas with which you can simply start over.

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