7 Halloween Tips for Military Families After a PCS

In early October 2012, I PCS’d with my wife and our 1-year-old daughter. There wasn’t a house ready for us, so by Halloween we were still living in temporary lodging, surrounded by whatever we had managed to keep with us during the move.

We loved Halloween. But we didn’t know our neighbors, didn’t know where families went trick-or-treating and barely knew our way around the installation.

Edward Perotti knows something about making Halloween memorable. The veteran event designer, sometimes called Hollywood’s “King of Halloween,” has spent more than three decades creating events worldwide. When I described that first Halloween after my PCS, he had a pretty good description for it: “a limbo moment.”

His advice for military families caught between their old home and a new one was simple.

“Don’t wait for someone else to come. And don’t wait for someone else to welcome you,” Perotti told Military.com. “You welcome yourself, and you get them to come to you.”

If your family is spending its first Halloween after a PCS in that same strange middle ground, here are seven ways to make the holiday feel familiar before the new duty station does.

1. Start With Your Installation’s Halloween Calendar

You may not know the best neighborhood for trick-or-treating yet, but your installation probably already has a place to start. Military.com also recommends getting acquainted with your neighborhood and installation after a PCS, including keeping tabs on base events.

Morale, Welfare and Recreation offices, youth centers, libraries, chapels and other installation programs commonly host seasonal events. Military OneSource recommends checking local MWR programs and MilitaryINSTALLATIONS when settling into a new duty station because installation events can also help families make connections.

Look at your installation website and official social media accounts for trunk-or-treats, costume contests, pumpkin events, haunted houses or movie nights.

Perotti’s larger point is worth remembering here: You’re already part of a community, even if it doesn’t feel that way yet.

“At the end of the day, especially on the military side, you are in a community,” he said. “Embrace it, don’t hide from it. Just go.”

It solves two problems at once. You have something to do, and you immediately start learning where everything is.

2. Ask Where Trick-or-Treating Actually Happens

Every duty station develops its own Halloween geography. At one installation, families may pack the housing areas. Somewhere else, everyone may head into the surrounding community. Overseas, the traditions can be completely different.

Your sponsor, housing office, unit families or other parents are better sources for that information than driving around on Halloween night hoping to spot a porch light.

But Perotti suggests taking that idea one step further. If you’re living somewhere that gets trick-or-treaters, give people a reason to stop.

“Why not put a hibachi outside and have a s’mores party that night as people are walking by with their kids?” he said. “Have hot chocolate for people that are walking by, and you take the introduction level to them.”

He has tried the strategy himself. When Perotti moved into his current home, he learned the previous residents had been so unfriendly that neighborhood children avoided the house on Halloween. His first year there, he bought full-size candy bars and made a point of welcoming people.

“It was like we were welcoming us to them,” he said. “And it set a different tone.”

For a military family that arrived three weeks ago, a cup of hot chocolate might accomplish more than another afternoon spent unpacking.

3. Keep One Old Tradition Alive

PCS season can make maintaining ordinary family traditions surprisingly difficult. Maybe the plastic pumpkin buckets are somewhere in a moving truck. The decorations might be in storage. Your favorite Halloween movie could be sitting in a box beneath six other boxes labeled vaguely as “living room.”

Don’t try to reconstruct your entire normal Halloween. Pick one thing.

Watch the movie. Make the same cookies. Order the pizza you always eat before trick-or-treating. Wear the ridiculous family costumes again. Call grandparents while the kids are dressed up.

Military OneSource encourages families to maintain children’s routines as much as possible during a PCS. A familiar Halloween ritual can become one small piece of continuity when nearly everything else has changed.

Perotti also cautions against trying to reproduce the holiday exactly as it existed at the last duty station. Your family is somewhere new. Halloween can change with it.

4. Decorate the Temporary Place Anyway

Temporary lodging does not exactly scream haunted mansion. That doesn’t mean Halloween has to wait until household goods arrive.

Perotti’s first decorating rule is especially useful after a PCS: shop your house before you shop the Halloween aisle.

“I don’t like the term recycle,” he said. “I think when it comes to Halloween, it’s about reimagining. … Look at what you already have before you buy.”

That can be remarkably cheap. In ideas Perotti provided to Military.com, a window silhouette made from black trash bags or construction paper costs an estimated $2 to $5 and takes about 15 to 20 minutes. Paper ghost garlands can be made for about $3 to $6.

Perotti suggested cutting bats from black garbage bags and putting a lamp behind them in the window. The point isn’t creating a professional haunted house.

“Nothing with Halloween decor has to be literal,” he said. “Everything is smoke and mirrors.”

When we were stuck between homes, the temptation was to think of temporary lodging as somewhere life hadn’t started yet. Halloween is a good excuse to reject that idea for an evening.

You live there right now. Put a ghost in the window.

Edward Perotti’s Cheap Halloween Ideas for a PCS

Still waiting on household goods? Perotti shared these inexpensive Halloween ideas with Military.com for families working with limited supplies and temporary spaces.

5. Use Halloween as an Excuse to Meet Someone

One of the hardest parts of a PCS is that making friends suddenly becomes another item on an already absurd to-do list. Halloween makes the introduction easier.

You don’t need an elaborate plan. Ask another family whether they want to walk the neighborhood together. Go to the installation event instead of attending alone. Introduce yourself to the people passing out candy next door.

Perotti’s advance ideas included simple activities specifically intended to get new neighbors talking: pumpkin-shaped name tags, a potluck snack table and homemade “get to know you” bingo cards.

Or skip the organized activities entirely and hand somebody a cup of hot chocolate.

Nobody needs a perfectly polished opening line when one child is dressed as Batman and another is attempting to eat a Reese’s Cup through a dinosaur mask.

6. Let the New Duty Station Add Something

Keeping an old tradition matters, but your first Halloween somewhere new can also be the beginning of another one.

Find a pumpkin patch you’ve never visited. Try the installation’s annual event. If you moved overseas, see how the surrounding community celebrates. Let older kids search for something nearby they want to try.

Perotti doesn’t have much patience for following Halloween trends simply because retailers say they’re fashionable. His advice is to figure out what Halloween looks like for your family.

“You are your own trend,” he said.

A PCS inevitably divides family life into places: We did this when we lived there. We started doing that when we moved here.

Halloween can become part of that family map.

Learn about your new duty station and give the new place one opportunity to surprise you.

7. Give Yourself Permission to Have a Weird Halloween

Your first Halloween after a PCS may not resemble the ones you remember.

Maybe the costumes came out of a suitcase. Maybe dinner comes from the commissary and has to be microwaved. Maybe your jack-o’-lantern sits outside temporary lodging instead of the house you thought you would have by now.

Perotti thinks that’s precisely the year to lower expectations.

“The move alone, the physical move alone, is enough pressure,” he said. “Make Halloween just silly and fun and simple.”

His final advice to military families was even simpler.

“Don’t take this so seriously,” Perotti said. “Do not put added pressure on you, even if you are a Halloween fanatic.”

You don’t have to recreate the Halloween you had after five years at your last duty station. “Just have fun.”

A PCS asks families to rebuild dozens of tiny pieces of everyday life at once. No checklist can instantly make an unfamiliar place feel like yours.

Sometimes it happens through something much smaller.

You learn which streets fill with trick-or-treaters. Your kid meets someone dressed as the same character. Somebody stops for hot chocolate. A neighbor tells you about something you should try next year.

And somewhere between the costumes, moving boxes and candy wrappers, the new place starts becoming home.