Spooktacular Halloween Party

Every year for the past four years we host a family-friendly Halloween party.  This really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because I don’t even like Halloween.  Seriously, the whole death/zombie/ghosts thing freaks me out.  I have zero desire to be scared, see no point to horror movies or haunted houses, and do not see the appeal of eating food that looks like eyeballs or any other body part for that matter.  The whole holiday is so odd to me, and that is why our annual party is just completely illogical.  But years ago I realized that I am raising boys and boys love Halloween, so I better get over my issues with it. 

Since we still have young kids I can get away with the friendlier side of Halloween for now.  But as Joey gets older he is asking for more and more spookiness...I see some over the top Halloweens in my future.  This year Joey was so excited about planning the party.  He poured over catalogs and browsed the internet for hours looking for just the right things to get.  I took him to Party City to pick out $40 worth of decorations and he said it was, “the best day of his life!”  Gee, I wonder who he takes after…

In the days leading up to the party we were hard at work decorating the house with both homemade crafts and store-bought items. This year we co-hosted the party with a good friend of ours.  She runs a daycare out of her house and had tons of great ideas for kid games and themed food.  It was a lot of fun doing the party together this year!

Our kitchen cabinets got some embellishments thanks to construction paper and tape...

A roll of black felt was easily transformed into bats which were placed in a swarm on a large mirror.

 

The night before the party we were hard at work wrapping apple juice boxes with white crepe paper and gluing on googly eyes to transform them into mummies.  Joey felt the need to be in character to do this task...

We also turned Nutter Butter cookies into ghosts by dipping them in melted white chocolate chips and adding sugar eyes to them.

Chocolate cupcakes with Oreo cookie eyes (Junior mint pupils) and Reese's Pieces beaks were fun to assemble.

Leftover white chocolate and chocolate sprinkle eyes turned ordinary pretzel sticks into yummy mummies!

Mandarin orange cups were turned into jack-o-lanterns with a Sharpie.

Altogether between the two hosts we had a ton of food!  Artichoke dip, deviled eggs with olive "spiders" on top, Chex Mix Muddy Buddies, chips, several different kinds of cupcakes, cookies made to look like witches hats, the list goes on and on!

 

The princess was ready to party and eagerly awaiting her guests to arrive...

Since I don't have permission from all the parents, I am not going to post most of the party pics.  But I will say that we had approx 30 kids arrive and it was total and complete Halloween chaos for a solid three hours.  We had witches, race car drivers, spiders and more, of all ages running around having a total blast!  We played games like eat the donut off the string, eyeball on a spoon relay races, a ghost pinata (that was madness with that many kids - just imagine the scene when that candy hit the ground), a Halloween fruit snack hunt in the backyard, pin the nose on the pumpkin, dig for prizes in brains and eyeballs (spaghetti and grapes), and even a costume contest (that was a total disaster because all the kids voted for themselves - it was a 30 way tie!). 

Here is Joey playing the donut game.  He came in third, and this was easily his favorite game of the day.

Here he is reaching into the bucket of brains and eyeballs for his prize...

Here is Logan playing the same game but after he touched it he gave up, he didn't care what the prize was!

The hard part about a party like this is that when it's over, you just want to clean everything up - but there are still a couple more days until Halloween.  We still have pumpkins to carve, the fall festival at school to attend, the haunted corn maze at Dave's Farm to navigate, It's a Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown to watch, and of course TRICK-or-TREATING!  Fun times!