Tips on Decorating Your Home for Halloween

Tips on Decorating Your Home for Halloween

Halloween is a fun holiday accompanied by imaginative decorations, more sweets than anyone should consume habitually, and good times for all ages. Holding your own Halloween party can be a lot of fun, providing you put some thought into the planning. Here are some tips on things to consider when preparing and decorating your home for Halloween.

First of all, when hosting a Halloween party in your home, it is important to consider age appropriate decorations during the planning stages. While blood, monsters and tombstones may be appropriate for teenagers and adults, this type of decoration can leave smaller children with nightmares for several weeks.

Another important step in party preparation that can save time and anguish after the event is protecting the surfaces of your furniture. Halloween costumes often involve makeup, colored hair sprays, and fake tattoos. Decorations may involve silly string, crepe paper, fake blood, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. All of these can leave accidental stains that can be difficult to remove from couches and chairs.

To protect their couch upholstery, many hosts and hostesses find that slipcovers are a cost effective solution. After the party, they can be taken off, cleaned in the washing machine, and reused again next year at Halloween. If purchased in the traditional Halloween colors of orange or black, slipcovers can also make the decorations more effective.

To protect your tables from accidental spills, use tablecloths, which look even better if they’re Halloween-themed. Tablecloths made from PVC are useful as they can easily be wiped clean. Alternatively, you could make your own using an old sheet and decorate it with hand prints or painted spiders.

If you’re having a sit-down meal, it’s worth using inexpensive dining chair slipcovers on your seats, both to protect them from food spills and to color coordinate them with the rest of your decorations.

Once the furniture is all protected by slipcovers and tablecloths, the following ideas might add to the ambience of an adult Halloween party of monstrous fun:

• Dry ice hidden in black pots, behind curtains, or under table cloths
• Black netting draped into corners with plastic spiders and bugs randomly attached
• Snakes strategically placed coming from under cushions, cabinets, or along window sills
• Tombstones fashioned from poster board with a special epitaph for each guest
• Piles of shrunken heads fashioned from carving faces on apples and allowing them to dry
• Bowls of eyeballs fashioned from white powdered doughnut holes and black and red icing

For adult Halloween parties, black out curtains are quite effective, and exchanging the regular light bulbs in lamps and light fixtures to red ones can be dramatic as well. Some hosts and hostesses even use black lights for a more frightening experience.
For a children’s Halloween party, decorations should concentrate on fun rather than the scare factor. Children find the following ideas appealing:

• Jack-O-Lanterns with comical faces
• Silly String spider webs with a variety of ants, lizards, and bugs
• Funny bony skeletons
• Tootsie Roll Pop ghost trees made from a tissue tied over this treat with a ribbon and dotted with eyes
• A curtain of wet spaghetti noodles hanging just low enough to touch the top of little heads
• Black and Orange balloons with silly faces glued onto them

Although the goal of decorating for a Halloween party is to provide entertainment for the guests, this task can also be an enjoyable experience for the family giving the party. Imaginative ideas are all over the web, and most are quite inexpensive. And if you take care to protect your furniture when putting up the decorations, you can really relax and enjoy your party!

Thanks to Simon Phillips from HalloweenPartyIdeas.org for the guest post!

Tips on Hosting the Most Spooktacular Halloween Costume Contest Ever

Tips on Hosting the Most Spooktacular Halloween Costume Contest Ever

Of all the traditions connected with Halloween, dressing up in an imaginative costume is the most exciting for many people. In fact, some stretch the pleasure over several weeks before October 31st as they brainstorm ideas for a costume and purchase or make the items needed to get it just right. To reward these people for their ingenuity and effort, it is always exciting to have a costume contest during a Halloween party.

To make the Halloween costume contest entertaining for all takes a bit of preparation before the party, but this will ensure that even the host or hostess can enjoy the fun. It is important to let the guests know before they arrive that a contest will be a big part of the evening and that prizes will be awarded for the best Halloween costumes. Depending on the age of the attendees, it might be nice to have a theme for the costumes, particularly if younger children are involved because some frighten quite easily. Some of the following themes might prevent the scare factor from getting out of control:

• Fairy Tale Characters

• Cartoon Characters

• Comic Book Characters

• A Day on the Farm

• Disney Movie Characters

Remember to inform the guests about the contest theme on the invitation and to get these out before guests begin buying, renting or making their outfits. This is particularly important at a family party where young kids will be present. In that situation, it’s usually better for the adults to wear the funny Halloween costumes rather than very scary ones that may frighten the children.

It is important to plan for the way winners will be chosen during the competition. One way to do this is to provide the guests with a voting station, which includes pens and a container such as a plastic pumpkin or spooky black caldron for holding ballots. Giving each guest a ballot as they arrive should prevent double voting. The ballots should have categories for the guests to fill in a name. While it is nice to have several categories so that more guests can win, a good host or hostess will want to ensure that there are as many losers as winners. If most people at the party win a prize, it is embarrassing for the few guests who do not win, so this is a balancing act. Having guests RSVP might be helpful in knowing how many categories are needed. The following categories work for adults or children:

• Most creative

• Funniest

• Most original

• Prettiest

• Best overall

• Most unusual

Finally, some type of prize or memento should be planned for the winners of the Halloween costume contest. These do not have to be expensive and can range from a small piece of candy to a trophy. The prizes can be purchased or homemade and can be serious or funny. One idea is to match the prize to the category. For example, the winner of the prettiest costume might receive a mirror and the funniest a book of jokes.

By following these tips for a great Halloween party contest, the event should go smoothly, and guests will be begging to participate again next year.

This is a guest post contributed by Simon Phillips who runs a website all about Halloween party ideas.

Halloween Recipes From the Food Network

This weekend, the Food Network started showing their Halloween specials. The shows are so much fun, not only do they showcase great recipes and help you create a menu for your Halloween Party, but all the Food Network stars are in fabulous costumes! You are sure to find some great Halloween party menu ideas both on the shows and on the Food Network web site. Of course, you will find plenty of recipes for Halloween sweets and treats, but also check out the savory Halloween dishes, like Emeril's "Vampire Chicken on a Stake with blood wine sauce", Paula Dean's Sea Creature Soup, Rachael Ray's Yummy Mummy appetizer, creepy cocktails, and pumpkin recipes. If you are in need of visual help and miss the shows on tv, you can see the videos online.