Alice in Wonderland Trunk or Treat Ideas You’ll Love

Creative and inexpensive ideas for creating a whimsical Alice in Wonderland scene for your upcoming Trunk or Treat!

Last year for Halloween our family dressed up as characters from Disney’s version of Lewis Carroll classic novel commonly referred to as, “Alice in Wonderland”. It was such a fun theme to dive into! There are a plethora of characters to choose from and most of them are fairly well known. So even when we were apart from each other, people knew what story we were from.

I was able to make most of the costumes myself fairly easily. The only completely finished costume pieces I purchased were the Alice dress and the Mad Hatter’s hat. Although I did find an awesome tutorial on how to make the hat, it was a little more time intensive than I wanted to tackle.

You can read all the details about our Alice in Wonderland family costumes over here (post coming soon!).

Every year our church hosts a trunk or treat. Since I always aspire to coordinate my family’s costumes for Halloween (our family firefighter costumes and trunk turned out pretty cute too!), it would only be fitting to have our trunk match!

I was extra inspired by the Alice in Wonderland theme. The color, the absurdity, and the creativity of the whole story makes for so many different fun possibilities! I settled on one particular scene that I knew I could duplicate. It’s when Alice is talking to the Cheshire cat and he opens up the pathway to the Queen’s castle through a tree.

I incorporated a few more aspects from different scenes to our Alice in Wonderland trunk which I thought was very fitting since the story really is very topsy-turvy.

DIY Alice in Wonderland Trunk

If you have been around my site much, you may be familiar with my affinity with cardboard. It’s free, sturdy, and the possibilities are endless! I had drawn out how I wanted our Alice in Wonderland trunk to look like and with the help of cardboard and a bit of paint and tape, I was able to make it come alive!

Adding the Cheshire Cat Character

One of the main reasons that I choose that particular scene with Alice in the forest is that it included the Cheshire Cat. As one of the main characters in the story, he definitely needed to make an appearance! Since none of us were dressing up as him, I wanted to make sure to include him somehow in our trunk display. So that particular scene was perfect!

So with the use of cardboard, I drew out our Cheshire Cat and recruited a bit of help in the painting process. I then used a sharpie to outline him and an X-ACTO knife to cut him out. And the result was a pretty dang good representation of that crazy cat if I do say so myself!

Giant Flowers … fail

I had seen a tutorial for making giant paper flowers while perusing Pinterest one day. And thought that they would be a perfect size to represent the singing flowers Alice comes across in her journey through Wonderland. So I set to work creating two lovely towering flowers. To help get them into character, I added a girly face to each.

They were perfect! …

for about five minutes.

It was extremely humid the evening of the Trunk or Treat, so my two beautiful flowers literally “wilted” from the moisture. You can see them on the right side of the trunk in the pictures. If that wasn’t bad enough, the occasional wind gusts didn’t help matters as they fell down time and time again.

Moral of the story, take in consideration the weather when choosing your props! The flowers were amazing but didn’t weather well in our situation.

Mad Hatter Tea Party

While I walked from trunk to trunk with the two littles, the plan was to have my husband pass out candy. Since he was the Mad Hatter, I had to figure out a way to have his character fit in with our Alice in Wonderland trunk display.

So I added a little tea party scene slightly off to the side of our “tree”. I also inserted some other elements from the movie. Again the story is so all over the place, that really you can’t go wrong with adding whatever you want!

Alice in Wonderland Trunk a Success!

While we were pulling up to the Trunk of Treat to set up, I realized I had forgotten a few key props at home. My husband then drove back while I did my best to set things up while watching the two littles. Needless to say, that put us way behind schedule which meant we ran out of enough light to take photos. So much to my older boy’s chagrin, the next day we all dressed up in costumes again. Then drove to a neighboring park’s empty parking lot to recreate our Alice in Wonderland scene to take pictures.

While we were snapping photographs, a few cars went out of their way to drive by curiously close to us. One even pulled right up alongside us and asked what we were up to. Then he asked if his kids could take a picture in front of our Alice in Wonderland trunk! Ha!

It all came together nicely! Oh and we won the award for best decorated trunk at our church’s Trunk or Treat! I would say that our Alice in Wonderland theme for Halloween was a success!