Hallowe’en is fast approaching, and my daughter and I are getting ready (in fact, she’s been getting ready for 6 months already!) It is the one night a year when it is socially acceptable to be as evil as possible, and she always takes advantage of it to be the most black and nasty character she can be. 

I've been thinking about greening Hallow'en, and here are my thoughts. I might be a queen (suits my name) so I could at least have one night where I could tell everyone what to do and get away with it (as a municipal councilor it actually doesn’t happen often, believe it or not!) but sometimes I like to become someone from another culture to try to understand it better. I’ve dressed Japanese before, and I’ve been thinking that it might be useful to dress up as someone from the Maldives or Bangladesh and walk around in wet feet all night in tribute to the trouble they are having from rising sea levels. However, I wouldn’t want to make light of their hardships, but finding a way to raise the profile of their plight on Hallowe’en would be cool. 

But, when you think about it, Hallowe’en is another holiday where Canadians often are not considerate of their environment. It is estimated that we spend $1.5 billion on Hallowe’en every year, with most of the expense being candy to hand out. This blog is about what we can do to make it greener and healthier and funner (if that is a real word). 

When I was doing the research to find out who had the best ideas, I came across a cool website, which is the most comprehensive, in my humble opinion: http://www.greenhalloween.org/ .

The most innovative idea I found was Reverse trick-or-treating. Instead of going to the doors and getting just regular chocolate, you go to the doors and hand out fair trade chocolate with some information on fair trade. http://www.globalexchange.org/campaigns/fairtrade/cocoa/

When I was little, I always collected for UNICEF, and it felt good to be helping children around the world, on a night when it was easy to see that we had more than we needed. It would be nice to see children being considerate of others. My daughter used to collect goodies then give them to extended family members who usually couldn’t afford treats like that. 

Watch for another blog where I’ll list off the best of the green ideas I’ve found. Have fun greening your Hallowe’en!