Every little child loves parties, and so do most of their parents, and Halloween combines the opportunity for a fun party and the irresistible chance to dress up to the hearts desire.
Here are a couple of ideas to help your party go with a swing ….
Fancy Dress
Funky Moose offer a great range of ready-made fancy dress costumes, such as wizards, witches, monsters and pumpkin princesses. But simple costumes can easily be made at home; grab a purple cloak or a long length of purple fabric, stick on some stars cut from silver and gold card, and a wizard cloak you have. Make and decorate a simple paper cone hat in the same way and paint a length of dowel black for the perfect magic wand, and the costume is complete. (One year, we even made some ‘Harry Potter-esque’ specs out of pipe cleaners for one of our little ones, which were excellent – but he now wears the real thing, so alas no pipe cleaners required this year).
For a witch, anything blank and long (one of Mums skirts with a big belt perhaps) is perfect or grab some black fabric to make a swishy cloak, grab a toy black cat and a long warty nose and away you go.
We all hid under white sheets as kids pretending to be ghosts, so make sure they choose an old sheet, help them cut a few eye holes (outline them in black felt pen for additional affect) and there you have it, an outfit (and a classic and fabulously fun outfit at that) in minutes.
Party Games
One of our favourites, albeit perhaps just as much fun for the grown ups (particularly after some Halloween punch) is Wrap the Mummy. All you need is some willing volunteers and several rolls of loo paper. The winning team is the one that wraps their ‘Mummy’ in full first.
Spooky Shadows can be a real hoot too …… all it takes is a white sheet hung on one wall and a lamp placed on a table on the opposite side of the room. One person sits down facing the wall (with the sheet) while someone else walks between them and the lamp … the result is a shadow cast on the sheet and the person sat down has to guess whose shadow it is. Some very interesting walks and poses are sure to follow in an attempt to disguise ones identity.
Witch’s Cauldron is another simple and enjoyable game. Place ten items into a large hollowed out pumpkin or bowl, cover with a cloth, turn off the main lights and each child then takes it in turn to put their hand in, feel the contents and guess what each item is. The winner is the child with the most correct guesses. Go to town with items for the pumpkin, some suggestions might be toy hairy spider (of course), witches nose, ping pong ball, large marshmallow, dice, tooth brush, apple …..
Party Food
In a word, Orange. Amaze your guests with an entire feast in Orange…… sweet potato wedges, sliced carrot and orange pepper, chicken with a breadcrumb (with paprika if liked) crust or honeyed chicken drumsticks, cheesy puffs (!) jelly boats (oranges 1/4ed, flesh scooped out and filled with jelly), all washed down with orange and mango juice punch in a large bowl (add some ping pong balls with eyes drawn on them for ‘decoration’ …. fabulous).
Make some spooky ghost cakes by covering simple fairy cakes with a circle of white icing and draw on some eyes and noses with black writing icing. (Not orange I know, but great fun). Or make bat chocolate cup cakes (image when we were little and we cut off the tops of fairy cakes to make butterfly wings .. well ‘bat-ify’ it). Use one of our orange cup cake stands to hold and display them all your spooky creations.
Party Prep
If you are sending out invitations, take some squares of white cotton (hankie sized), write the party details around the edge. Pop the centre of the cotton square over a lollipop and tie at the top of the stick (making the head of the lollipop into the head of a ghost), draw some black eyes onto the head of the ghost and hand out to all the invitees …. sure to get them into the Halloween mood.
Needing to take presents to a party, how about a spooky library bag, a Rosie Flo night-time colouring book or a spooky Shiver-Stone Castle game.
Oh and one last thing, have fun.