Halloween is my family’s favorite holiday. We love celebrating it to the fullest, and that usually means throwing an annual house party. Every year since my kids were born, we have hosted some thing for them to commemorate the event. Initially it was a silent dinner with the grandparents. Then it grew to a garden bouncy-house affair for the preschool households. Before long we were encouraging what felt like every young family from the area. For a few years, we had about 70 to 80 costumed bodies of varying ages running round our modest-size house. It was fun — before it was not.
Furniture broke walls obtained chipped, little handprints showed up everywhere, and nearly every square inch of flooring inside and out was glazed with tacky tacky residue. I’d spend more cleaning up after the festivities than enjoying them.
It was time to call it quits on these big-scale house parties in favor of drop-off parties that were friendlier to house and hostess. Here are a few of the lessons I have learned over the years for throwing a successful and tame children’s Halloween house party. I hope you are able to glean some useful tips for your party — and please share some other useful advice from the Remarks.
1. Limit the guest list. You want just the number of kids you can fit around a table to get organized art projects. I discovered the hard way that youthful party revelers want leadership. Give kids free rein and suddenly you’ve got a bunch of them on your master bedroom closet pulling purses.
Should you) limit your guest list into a manageable number and 2) give the kids something to keep their artistic minds and hands busy, everyone wins.
2. Let your kids create the invitations. My favourite way to kickstart the Halloween season is to brainstorming our forthcoming party with my kids and create those all-important invitations that place the party’s mood.
With everyone’s busy schedules, it’s ideal to get invitations to people’s hands as soon as possible. We send them in the start of the month, before our decorations go up.
All these jack-o’-lanterns are among our favourite homemade invitations. The kids get so motivated after making invitations they beg to help me with the rest of the house decorations.
3. Decorate the house in manners. We used to get a life-size singing zombie in our front porch. My young kids at the time believed it was humorous, but a few of the buddies were scared by it. The zombie that is poor needed to go.
A note about candles: once we have a houseful of kids, we take special care to use real burning candles just when an adult is stationed next to them. Otherwise we favor battery-operated ones.
We still attempt to use an array of mildly spooky screens (think oversize spider webs, bubbling cauldrons and flying bats), but nothing else that looks so true that a youngster can not recognize it as pretend.
To temper anything which may freak out kids, we add something lighthearted, like the actual Housewife of Pumpkinville shown here.
This photo, taken a few years back, shows what I have learned not to do anymore: place snacks in easy-to-reach spots.
4. Make wholesome stuff accessible on your food table. You would not make a bedroom or family area where you could not easily get into the bed or sofa. Translate this into party food. Most of us don’t associate Halloween with wellness, and that is exactly why guests in our house parties will always find veggies and fruits on the outermost regions of the table. This may be a kid could reach without help, which makes him or her more likely to fulfill up on create before being able to access the sugary snacks positioned in the center of their table.
I’m not a health fanatic, just a mother who is seen too many kids leave my house with a green cast to their own faces. Including my own kids. It stinks to finish a fantastic party feeling like you are going to be sick.
5. Provide games that work with the stream of your dwelling. When the crafts are exhausted,I love to get an assortment of games that keep little guests rotating throughout the spaces I need them in, and that divert them from the rooms they don’t have any business entering.
To facilitate this, I will probably set a bingo game round the coffee table, doughnuts onto a series on the front porch, an oversized memory match on the back lawn and a Pin the Tail on the Cat match onto a wall far enough away from anyone or anything that can be stumbled on.
From our family to yours, have a happy and safe Halloween!
Which are your strategies for a fair and safe Halloween house party?