Halloween 2019 Trunk-or-Treat

Last Thursday night we volunteered to decorate Kraig's car and hand out candy at the school's "Truck-or-Treat" event. We had the idea of creating a "Haunted Vending Machine" - more about that in a moment. This year the kids really weren't sure what they wanted to be for Halloween. We went to Party City for inspiration and they each chose a costume. Ronan wanted to be Captain America. No, he doesn't know who that is, but he loved the idea of holding the shield that came with the outfit. We're not exactly sure what Brielle is, but it's kind of a ripped, flowing, zombie-type outfit to which she added black wings. She may add fangs and wound tattoos for trick-or-treating on Halloween.

  

We liked the idea of a Halloween-themed vending machine, for obvious reasons. And it was a lot of fun to make. We got a cardboard folding board from Michael's - the kind you use for science fair projects. We cut holes, covered it with silver paper, used a glue gun to attach old candies we found to pipe cleaner "coils", then the kids made labels. We attached a smaller box to the back to drop the candy into from the back.

Since we were actually giving out candy donated by families, and since we only had 6 buttons to play with, kids couldn't literally choose which candy they wanted (although some younger kids did try to remove them directly from the display). We came up with the idea of using a Halloween doorbell decoration we had around, since it had several buttons that made unique, scary sounds when pressed.

  Kraig and I were ghoulish vending machine operators, wearing our work outfits and black and white makeup.

  After a quick setup, we experienced a crazy frenzy of non-stop lines of kids, as well as a lot of pride as people commented about how they loved the idea. The kids, and even some adults, really seemed to think that we had built a real machine that dispensed candy after a button was pressed. The truth was that one of us was on the outside, guiding the kids and holding up the top of the "machine" so it didn't topple over. The other was inside the trunk, behind the "machine", listening to the button pressed and dispensing candy into the attached box. Every once in a while we'd throw out a plastic spider to surprise people.

We took turns spending time in the hot, sweaty car, tearing through around 10 bags of candy to accommodate the hundreds of kids who pushed buttons. We dropped candy into the box with one hand while holding the doorbell in place with the other (so it didn't get pushed in by enthusiastic kids). We were so swamped we didn't even get a chance to walk around to see the other 30 cars and collect candy with the kids. When Ronan was done, he was excited to be the "ghost in the machine" and help with dropping candy.

Here's the machine in action...

For Halloween we may just be trick-or-treating in the neighborhood, which will be pretty calm. Brielle and Ronan may actually be the only kids out there. So there may not be additional photos. It feels like the school's truck-or-treat is our main exciting Halloween event each year. It was a lot of work, but a ton of fun! We're happy the kids were proud that our vending machine impressed their friends.