Looking for creative Halloween treats? Need ideas for navigating a certain candy-centric holiday with your vegan family? Seeking some treats not rife with GMO’d up corn syrup and child slavery? Look no further! Created by Vegan Street’s Marla Rose, Humane Halloween offers a collaborative space where conscious eaters can find and share ideas for celebrating Halloween — vegan style!
I recently had the chance to visit with Humane Halloween creator Marla Rose, best known for bringing consistent excellence to the table via Vegan Street and Vegan Feminist Agitator.
MR: As vegan parents raising vegan children, we need our traditions — we need those things the kids look forward to every year… other kids get to have that, and our kids should get to have it too.
It’s the little touches — it’s the little things that make it special… it doesn’t have to be that much work. Cutting out tortillas with cookie cutters, like ghost shapes or bat shapes or cat shapes or whatever… it’s those little touches that make it special, and they’re easy to do. If you’re a transitioning [to vegan] family, incorporate some of the old traditions that you used to have; but keep making it your unique, special, fun day!
Traditionally non-vegan-friendly holidays can cause stress for vegan families, with parents encountering extra challenges in terms of social navigation and reinvention of family customs. Remember, the name of the game is FUN! If you focus on putting new traditions into your family’s holiday celebration, rather on leaving the old ones out, you’ll quickly find yourself leaving stress behind and simply celebrating the holiday — in bold new fun ways, consistent with your family’s values of kindness and compassion.
MR: Halloween is supposed to be fun, it’s not supposed to be stressful… it should be fun, it should be a joy!
I wanted to start Humane Halloween because I was very inspired, over the years, by this event called Reverse Trick-or-Treating, which was started by Global Exchange — I don’t think they’re doing it anymore, I tried to research it and it doesn’t look like they’re doing the same program — but you’d go door to door, or give your trick-or-treaters these cards that talk about fair trade chocolate and the importance of supporting child-labor-free chocolate, and on the back you could use a little bit of tape to put a fair-trade chocolate on…
In that spirit of reshaping traditions for the forces of good, Marla created Humane Halloween to provide a collaborative space where conscious eaters can share tips, tricks, ideas, and recipes for a more compassionate, more fair-trade-friendly, and less commercialized All Hallows celebration.
Humane Halloween also offers free graphics for letting other compassion enthusiasts know your house is conscious-eater-friendly.
MR: We can also cut out a sign — that probably won’t mean much to people this first year — that identifies your house as one that has compassionate vegan treats… it’s also about just planning a holiday of our own, you know; we don’t have to go without, it shouldn’t be about going without or not enjoying [the holiday]… I mean, Halloween is magic!
Our vegan kids should be able to participate in that magical Halloween fun, in a way that also celebrates the compassion and kindness that makes them vegan kids.
Humane Halloween offers a wealth of ideas for making that goal a reality. Check it out!
For the full (EXCELLENT!) interview with Marla Rose, about vegan cooking for kids in general and family-friendly vegan Halloween shenanigans in particular, grab your ear buds and your pumpkin spiced latte (which recipe I found at Humane Halloween!), and have a listen:
Happy vegan organic fair trade Halloween treat-finding, everyone!
Image credit: Halloween kid photo via Shutterstock.
