Still wondering if Halloween is canceled?
Here's an easy — and cute! — solution if you have a little one who is desperate to dress up and hunt for candy, but you feel squeamish about trick-or-treating when COVID-19 numbers are still pretty scary.
Ashlee Nicholas, a special needs teacher in the San Francisco area and a mom to 2-year-old Alexander, told TODAY Parents she was looking for safe ways for her students and her own little boy to celebrate Halloween this year, amidst the social distancing rules due to COVID-19.
She came across a post on Instagram with ideas, including a cute ghost candy bag hack that involves folding white tissue paper around candy, then gathering the tissue paper around the candy, tying it with a festive orange ribbon, and drawing a little friendly ghost face on it.
Nicholas decided to plan a "ghost hunt" for Alexander on Halloween so he can hunt for the cute candy bags safely around the house, but then she decided to take the idea a step further. By adding glow sticks to the ghosts, parents can also easily plan a glow-in-the-dark version of the ghost hunt as well!
But Halloween, as we all know, is not just about candy for kids — don't worry, parents, Nicholas didn't forget about you.
Turns out, candy is not the only thing that looks cute when you wrap it up in tissue paper and draw a face on it. Conveniently, miniature, airplane-size bottles of alcohol also make great goodies for an adult version of a Halloween ghost hunt! Just don't mix up the ghosts meant for the kiddos and the ghosts meant for their pandemic-weary parents.
Though her original ghost candy bag hack video now has 3.2 million views on TikTok, Nicholas told TODAY Parents, "The whole point of all of this wasn’t to get TikTok famous; it was to help people be safe and still have fun."
A good bonus, she said, is seeing people on social media coming together to make Halloween happen despite COVID-19. "The best part of all of this has been people saying their Halloween is 'saved' now because of this video and random strangers sharing their own fun ideas with the world. I love it."
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Nicholas has planned a ghost hunt at home for her own son and a glow-in-the-dark version at her mother's house down the street. "It's super easy, but it's also super fun," Nicholas said. "I asked my mom if she would hide some glow ghosts for me too, and I’m 31!"
