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Halloween Party -5yr- Tombstone Invites

Oct 2002

Terri in Longmont, Co USA

Special Mention

We had a Halloween birthday party for my 5 year old son. 1st we made invitations. I took his picture after we dressed him as dracula (very easy). We painted his face white, dripped red face paint from lips etc. slicked back his hair, gave him some fake dracula teeth, put on a white shirt, his sister's black leggings and a red cape (found a red silk shirt and draped it to look like a cape). Then we made a tombstone out of cardboard and with red dripping paint wrote "Come to my party or ELSE!" and took a digital photo of him holding the tombstone. That was the front of the card. Inside held the details. We bought spooky music, borrowed black lights from teenagers on the street (amazing how many we came up with). We bought dry ice and placed it in locations where no one could play with or trip on it. We bought a helium tank from Walmart for 19.00 and blew up black and orange ballons and attached long, long metallic ribbons from them so people had to walk through the strings. We bought glow in the dark spider webbing among other decorations and made the living room spooky. 

For food we had bat chips. Take tortilla's and using a bat cookie cutter cut out a ton of bats from the tortilla's. Brush them with canola oil and sprinkle lightly with salt.On a cookie sheet, place under broiler till crispy. Watch them they cook quickly then burn if you forget. We had diced fruit with tombstone toothpicks inserted. I found some halloween clipart on internet. Using a tombstone one, I printed them out, about 20 to a sheet and had the kids cut them out. Take a toothpick and paste a tombstone on it and one on the back leaving room to insert toothpick into fruit.

We made punch to drink. Freeze gummy spiders - found at Mountain Man Candy Stores - in ice cubes or fill up a plastic glove with one of the punch ingredients and freeze. Unwrap the hand then float hand in punch bowl. (There are many directions on the internet on how to do this, look on halloween sites using your browser). We also made witches fingers using bread dough and salt. Halved almonds painted red with food coloring for fingernails. You can find these instructions on internet also.  Or use Martha Stewart's instructions in her October 2000 magazine). You need to par boil these so get the directions. We placed the fingers in a bowl of dried beans that were covered with crushed oreo's. So it looked like a hand coming out of the ground. We also made halloween hands. Take plastic food service gloves bought at a resturant supply store. Put a piece of candy corn wide side down in each finger for fingernails. Fill with carmel corn and close with rubberbands.  They look pretty real and cool! 

For games.. We played a spider web game. First I made spider web soap. I bought a brick of glycerin Soap from Michaels. I bought rubbery spidery webs and skeletons from Walmart Halloween party section cheap. Melt chunks of soap in microwave, drop one drop of food coloring in and a drop of essential oil for scent (I picked out a stress relief/relaxing essential oil for the kids- ha!!), stir. Place a spider web or skeleton in a small piece (soap size) of tupperware or rubbermaid leftover container- face down. Pour melted, colored - lighter colors work better, scented soap over object till just covered. Set in your freezer until firm.  (I vaselined the container the first time). Soap just pops out. I wrapped soap in a clear spiderweb plastic gift wrap I found and tied with a ribbon. Use a somewhat clear wrap so kids can see the spooky soap through the wrap. This whole process takes about 10 minutes and the finished product is so cool. Then I attached a piece of orange yarn on the wrapped item. The yarn was about 20 feet long. I had 12 of these wrapped soaps with yarn attached. I hid the soaps in the playroom with the yarn running all over the place criss crossing like a spider web.  At the start each child had an end to a piece of yarn. He/she had to follow/untangle it (I made simple tangles, no knots). To find the trinket at the end. They LOVED this. 

We also played a non wet version of bobbing for apples. Many of the kids were small and I couldn't see them sticking their heads in a tub of water. I took bamboo plant stakes (you can use anything...dowls, wrappping paper tubes etc) and painted them black. Using the same orange yarn I made fishing strings and attached marshmallows on the ends. You could use pumpkin cookies apples, donuts etc. We just didn't want to jack the kids up on sugar at night. I had 6 fishermen and six fish. The fishermen held the poles while the fish attempted to bite the marshmallows. Then the fishermen switched with the fish. The kids LOVED this also.  The last "games we played (none of our games had winners or losers), was a story telling game. All the kids sat in a circle. I had wrapped 12 simple trinkets and placed them all in a velvet bag. I then told a spooky halloween story. The story needs to have one word that you can repeat many times. I told the "Teeny Tiny Witch." You can probably find it in the library. The word bone appears many times. As the story is being told the velvet bag passes around. When the word bone is heard the bag stops and whoever is holding the bag can take out a wrapped trinket.  This is a good calm down game and the kids sit and listen VERY anxiously.   We had a skeleton skull cake and goody bags with trinkets from Oriental Trading Post. It was a great success.

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