Halloween is a favorite holiday of kids and adults alike. Celebrated on October 31st, Halloween started with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, where people would wear costumes to ward off ghosts and would light bonfires as well. In the eighteenth century, All Saints Day was designated as November 1st as a time to honor all saints, making the night before it known as All Hallows Eve, later called Halloween. Now, we celebrate Halloween with activities like carving pumpkins, dressing up in costumes, eating sweets, and trick-or-treating.
In preparation of Halloween, community members decorate their houses and businesses, teachers decorate their classrooms, and children choose which costume they’d like to wear to celebrate Halloween.
At Gibbs Smith, we love celebrating this holiday by reading some festive books to enrich and inspire humankind. Here are 5 Books Perfect for Halloween that we’re reading this year!
Countdown to Halloween
Brimming with Halloween excitement, each spread of this charming primer invites toddlers to find and count objects hidden in just-spooky-enough scenes of fall fun.
Halloween is coming! Toddlers learn to count down from 10 by finding objects hidden throughout these charming scenes of fall fun rendered in illustrator Greg Paprocki’s classically retro midcentury art style. From walking through corn mazes and bobbing for apples to choosing costumes and telling spooky stories around a fire, there’s excitement on every page. The final spread is packed with surprises! Discover new details in each illustration with every successive reading.
Spooky Snacks and Treats
42 creepy, icky, sweet, or sticky kid-friendly recipes for Halloween parties and events.
Make your Halloween party a scream with these creepily cool snacks, munchies, sweets, and drinks found in Spooky Snacks and Treats: Frightfully Fun Halloween Recipes for Kids. Zac Williams serves up the best goodies in the neighborhood, sure to elicit squeals of delight from your young guests and goblins. With 42 recipes to choose from, you and your child can stir up a cauldron of Wolfsbane Elixir, scare up a platter of Vampire Bites, Coffin Crunchers, and Dusty Old Bones, or wrap up some Mummy Pups and Eye-of-Newt Salad that will keep trick-or-treaters of all ages feeling ghoulish and full. Boo!
Fall Walk
Learn about autumn leaves through a lyrical tale with illustrations and activities.
With beautiful illustrations and a lyrical narrative, Virginia Snow takes children on a fun and educational adventure. Take a stroll through the woods and learn to identify 24 different kinds of leaves by their shapes and autumn colors. At the end of the day, learn how to press the gathered leaves and how to make a leaf rubbing.
Book includes:
• Colorful illustrations of 24 separate leaves
• How-to instructions for pressing your own leaves
• How-to instructions for rubbing your own leaves
• A game matching leaves to trees and names
• Fun facts about the trees featured in the book
B is for Boo
Introduce your brilliant baby to the ABCs with this illustrated primer about Halloween.
Greg Paprocki’s popular retro-style series of sturdy board book alphabet primers expands to introduce brilliant babies and toddlers to one of the most popular holidays on the calendar: Halloween. Just as other books in this series make learning history fun and engaging for children, this volume will fuel the anticipation of your child’s first Halloween and help to expand their vocabulary in the process.
B Is for Boo: A Halloween Alphabet features a collection of twenty-six illustrations featuring Halloween-themed concepts, including imaginative costumes, oodles of treats, pumpkins galore, masks and monsters, and haunted houses.
101 Things to do with Pumpkin
Pumpkins mark the onset of fall and those who love the flavor look forward to pies, cookies, hot spiced drinks and breads of all kinds. 101 Things to Do with Pumpkin is a handy way to incorporate this favorite flavor into your kitchen repertoire for not just a season, but year-round.
