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A post shared by Waylon Lewis (@waylonlewis)

A month or so ago I started wondering how we could do a zero-waste, plastic-free Halloween that was vaguely healthy and local-supporting and affordable and equally importantly—fun! I didn’t want to be the raisins and apples house, though I love both. I wanted to give a good name to eco/mindful.

Our house in Indianapolis is in Halloween-central–some of the houses leave their skeletons up all year—there’s a median and it’s kid-friendly and they fence it all off to traffic for Halloween. Our neighbor Eric said last year he clicker-counted 960 children who came to his door, I think.

So I knew I had to have a big quantity, yet still affordable, and ideally not buying off of Amazon or whatever, and zero plastic, and organic. Impossible right?

I posted to Reddit/r/zerowaste, and shared my ideas, and got tons of great suggestions. Turns out many of the old school candies are safely wrapped in waxed paper, not plastic–Tootsie Rolls, caramels, toffees, and many come in paper boxes–Nerds, for example.

Still, it’s Big Candy and Big Sugar and lots of shipping and plastic tape etc goes with that. Not bad though!

I kept thinking and Kelsey and I settled on this: an old-fashioned, brand new, lighting-up, rolling on bicycled wheels, red and gold and silver popcorn machine. It’s nearly as tall as me! It cost about $200 bucks. That’s a lot, but not nearly as much as I would have spent in candy. And it lasts! We’ll use it a few times a week all year, since we love movies and cuddling and popcorn.

Then I went to the local hippie grocery we love, Good Earth, after calling and talking with Nicole, and bought $20 bucks of popcorn kernels—all organic–in a big brown paper bag, and put that in a cardboard box they gave me. I bought a bunch of sea salt in cardboard and coconut oil (from my pals at Dr. Bronner’s) and avocado oil. Turns out I bought way too much salt and oil, so we’ll have those to use through the year (I also use coconut oil on my face each morning).

All in all, the popcorn and stuff cost very little. I probably went through not even half of one coconut oil jar, and less than half of one salt container.

I’d already biked to the local 100-year-old paper goods company, and bought 500 brown paper bags. No bleaching, perfect size (they had every size), and unlike the classic red and white popcorn boxes that have a printing and lining on them, totally compostable. 500 bags cost $14.

Then, I rolled out the machine, after struggling to put it together the night before (not hard, just takes a little brain focus), and lit it up, heated it up, and for the next few hours we had a line nearly down to the sidewalk up our stairs to our porch. The lit-up machine was fun, we kept the porch lights off so it was the center of attention, and we were surrounded. I was dressed in honor of one of my idols, Robert Redford, (in Way we Were), and Kelsey as our idol Jane Goodall. She and her son Leo did about half the salting of folks’ popcorn. It was a nice routine—the children had to wait, usually, a few seconds to a few long minutes–so we chanted Pop! Pop! Pop! while hopping or talked excitedly or as I served popcorn the next batch was heating up and popping. We put our ears to the machine to see when it started popping, and when it stopped. The children learned to wait in eager anticipation instead of being bored in a bad way, and we made it fun and exciting and encouraged children to wait their turn, not push, let little ones or those waiting longest go first…and say thank you and please. Folks said it was their favorite house. Some folks couldn’t wait the four minutes at longest, and I get that–there were 100 houses. Sometimes the popcorn came out right when I was done serving the prior round. The children were sweet and cute and fun and some were so helpful to others and kind. You had to make sure none got to close to the front, as it’s hot inside (though not outside the machine, anywhere, thankfully) and to keep children away from the cord, where it was plugged in, I set up my supplies all around the cord. And then I passed out paper bags and asked folks to help and to open their bags and hold them out. Then we salted ’em. We also had olive oil, also organic, don’t panic, for the popcorn and salt but would have needed another helper to make that happen.

As I walked around the end of the night, with a excited but scared Winfield (dogs and Halloween outfits…), people said “you’re the popcorn guy!” Neighbors exclaimed what a success it was. As the rookies, we were pleased and happy and…exhausted.

And the planet and local community was no worse for it, and perhaps a bit better for it all. Happy Halloween! Plastic is spooky!