When you have kids, Halloween is not an end-of-October affair. It’s a month-long (or more!) foray into imaginative play, dramatic dress-up, extravagant decorating and magical thinking. In our household, Halloween encompasses at least one-twelfth of the calendar year and probably a much greater percentage of my children’s mental space. Creating a Halloween photo book to showcase all the activities leading up to the 31^st underscores the important themes of togetherness, creativity and fun that come out of a holiday with more surface messages of sugar and scariness. Start with Mixbook’s Halloween photo book template, then add in photographs from the following categories all month long. Decorate your pages with stickers and captions to make your Halloween album a personalized scrapbook you’ll want to print for your family, plus friends and family members near and far.

The Decorations If you’re a parent, you have probably had to work hard to stave off decorating for Halloween until October. This year I gave in and put up decorations on September 30^th, so there will be a full month of listening to the animatronic crow cackling at everyone who crosses our threshold. I enlisted the kids’ help and snapped shots of them helping to string up everything from skeletons to cobwebs to chronicle the process of transforming my home for Halloween. A series of photographs that capture the decorating process is ideal for a few pages in the opening section of your Halloween photo book.

The Costumes Just one disguise? Never! Kids have a way of shape-shifting their way through October, morphing their alternative identity along the way with a combination of costumes accumulated over time. Capture the creative process throughout the month, culminating with the piece de resistance on Halloween night.

The Crafts Go on Pinterest to search for age-appropriate crafts to do with your children in the coming weeks. Whether you work together to create the creepiest monster door in the neighborhood or you put together a menagerie of Halloween-themed Legos out of orange, black, green and white bricks, it’s great fun to snap pics of your kids and their friends and family members teaming up in the name of Halloween.

The Treats If you have little kids, you are likely familiar with the phenomenon that suddenly the most everyday food becomes spooky. Hamburgers are haunted, pancakes are possessed, smoothies are scary. Chronicle the transformation of everyday foods to fiendish fare over the course of the month.

The Carving Collect photos of the carving of jack-o-lanterns – everything from picking the perfect gourd to scooping out the ghoulish insides and carving a demonic face. Use low-light settings to be sure you capture nighttime photos optimally.

The Big Night Last but not least, chronicle the candy-fueled night of trick-or-treating starting with costumes and make-up, moving on to traipsing house-to-house, then spiraling into candy-trading and sugar-crashing. Remember that quick-fire series photos can beautifully (and often hilariously) capture a progression of events that will conjure up happy times for years to come.