On Halloween back in 2018, our family had a blast at a neighborhood Trunk or Treat block party event that some awesome people in our neighborhood put together. We had so much fun that we decided then that if they did it again, we wanted to be part of the fun. Fast forward to this year and October ended up being one of the toughest months of events, work commitments, and viruses to date for our family. It was the middle of the month, the block party was on, we had committed to decorate a trunk…and we had no idea what to make.
I was looking for inspiration (and there’s a lot out there) when I happened across this Frankenstein Trunk or Treat kit from Joann’s.
I really liked the simplicity of it, and we already had a set of dinner-plate sized googly eyes in our Halloween decoration stash. Our car is blue, so when I thought about the Googly eyes, that inspiration trunk, and what I could do for a blue character, I immediately thought of Cookie Monster. We had a scrap of flexible plastic wallboard that we used for the back of our kitchen island, so I sketched the shape of Cookie Monster’s head out on it with a Sharpie, cut that out with a reciprocating saw, and we were off to a great start.
I was planning to buy some blue paint, but Amy suggested that I go to the dollar store and buy a blue plastic table cloth, which worked out perfectly to cover the white board. I also bought a black table cloth to use as the inside of his mouth, and 2 battery powered blue LED strings, bringing my expense for the whole project to $4 plus tax. We also wrapped a couple round pieces of cardboard in brown felt to make a couple extra cookie decorations.
On the right up there, is the ION Block Rocker portable speaker that we’ve had for about a year now and absolutely love. I wanted to make our trunk or treat more interactive and decided to try to make Cookie Monster talk. I started off looking for sound bytes from Cookie Monster that I could play on demand when I discovered the perfect solution – a Cookie Monster soundboard that, A.) worked on our kids’ Fire Tablet, and B.) Cached all the audio when the page loaded so that it could work with the tablet offline.
With my table-cloth wrapped Cookie Monster head shape, giant Googly eyes attached to a clothes hanger, cookie decorations, and over 200 packs of individually wrapped cookies and candy in tow, it only took about 10 minutes to set up our trunk. I gave our little dragon the tablet to test it out.
Shorty after getting set up, one of the first families that came by our car were dressed in Sesame Street shirts.
The one thing we didn’t plan on was how scary it might be to tell kids to reach into the mouth of a giant talking Cookie Monster. We frightened some kids, made lots of parents laugh, and had a blast.
