Are you the sort of person who needs no excuse to throw a party? It just takes a birthday, graduation or leaving do – and you’re ready, organising the guest list, venue and food. If this is you, then Halloween must be your favourite time of year! You can go as crazy as you like with all aspects of a Halloween party – there are no limits on October 31st.
Pick a Theme for Halloween
You need to decide on a theme for your Spooktacular event. There’s the traditional theme of ghosts and spiders – it’s an easy thing to do. Hang bats from helium-filled balloons so they hover above everyone’s heads and have ghouls floating along the walls. If your party is for grown-ups, how about a day of the dead idea with sugar skulls, roses and lots of black and red? A spooky forest can be your focus, simply bring in gnarly looking tree branches, creepy owls and eyes looking out from the foliage. A goth theme can be created using crucifixes, crows and candle-wax covered bottles. Just make sure most of your props are black and it’ll give the right feel. If the shin-dig is for younger ones, stick to monsters, wizards and witches with a gentler Halloween theme. Broomsticks in corners and a big book of spells are all you need here.
Send Out The Invitations
Once you’ve settled on a theme, you can send out invites to complement your choice. Pick your wording carefully and get everyone in the Halloween mood. Decorate with fake webs or droplets of blood, and remember to let them know that anyone not in fancy dress will get fed to the vampire bats! Pop a jelly worm in the envelope or a pair of sugar fangs so the fun starts as soon as the date is set.
Plan your Halloween Party Food
This is where the fun really starts – let your imagination loose and start preparing in plenty of time. Serve humous in a scooped-out vegetable head, and create cheese straws that look like snakes. Make your own pizza fingers with cheese for flesh and tomato sauce nails. Fruit kebabs are a healthy option, but make them Halloween themed using green and orange fruit decorated with icing eyes. Dip strawberries in melted white chocolate, leave a dribble for a tail and you will have tiny little ghosts. When it comes to a centrepiece, it has got to be a tower of Halloween cakes and cupcakes decorated with spooky sprinkles, hats, bats and pumpkins. Arranged on a plate covered in crumbled chocolate, the sweet treats will look like they popped out of the dirt. You can have the creepy Halloween cakes for desert, or give them out as a treat to take home at the end of the evening.
Halloween Drinks
Now you’re in full swing, you have to plan frighteningly good beverages to make the party complete. Grasshopper cocktails are perfectly green for Halloween, and you can serve jelly shots with candy eyes floating inside. Serve colourful aperitifs in test tubes or in glasses that are smeared in fake blood. For kids, pour evil looking squash in cups with stuck-on googly eyes or in jam jars painted with a viscous set of teeth.
Party Games
Everybody loves a party game once the ice is broken. You could have a competition using sculpting balloons to see who can make the best balloon cockroach. How about hanging ring donuts iced in green on different lengths of string. See who can eat the most in a set time – no hands allowed, or who can gobble theirs up the fastest racing against each other. Adults and kids can play ‘pin the grin on a pumpkin’ together . All you need is a huge pumpkin, 2 cut-out eyes and a mouth. Blind-fold on, who can get stick all the features in the right place? What a photo opportunity!
Scarily Good Tunes
While everyone mingles, hit the sound system with a prepared playlist. You can have hours of fun curating tunes such as Michael Jackson’s Thriller, Zombie by The Cranberries and The Devil Went Down To Georgia – the Charles Daniel Band. It might be totally cheesy – but when you are thinking about how to plan a Halloween party, just remember that it’s all about the fun.
Why not take a look at our selection of Halloween treats here?