Halloweeeeeeen.

I LOVE holidays. All of them. Valentine’s day, St. Patty’s Day, Thanksgiving, 4th of July… ALL OF THEM. But I especially love Halloween. And with October fastly approaching (ps… HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?!?!) Halloween has been on my mind. I have thrown a Halloween party for the last two years for the young adults at my church and have already set the date for this year. Since its been so prominently on my mind (and my pinterest feed) I thought I would share some of the things I have done for those parties here on the blog! I’ll start with the first annual party in 2011.

I’d lived in my house for about 6 months and we were starting a young adult group at church so we thought it would be fun to have a Halloween party to break the ice. Plus I love any reason to dress up! So I set about doing what I do best and themed out the house for the party.

The halloween cookies are this recipe for Sugar cookies from Annie’s Eats with her recipe (and tutorial) for Royal Icing. I found some cookie cutters from Target that were halloween themed. I love making these cookies for lots of holidays because you can adapt them to whatever the theme. You can’t go wrong with something this cute that are also DELICIOUS… these cookies always go fast!!

I’d also seen a post on Pinterest with the ‘monster cake’ with all the eyes (he kinda reminds me of a monster from Monster’s Inc) and thought I’d try my hand at making him…

I think he turned out super cute, but I soon learned that parties are great for finger food… not so much for cake, so i didn’t make him again. And a big shout out to my BFF who made the Cake Pops for eyes… she rocks at Cake Pops and is always willing to contribute to my crazy ideas.

The printout framed in the back came from a free download here that I printed out a few years ago. (Sorry I don’t have a good picture of it here… stay tuned for tomorrow to get a better view). The rest of the food was pretty much Orange themed… carrots, cheeseball and wheat thins, trail mix of peanuts, raisins, fall colored M&Ms and candy corn.

You can see in the background of the first picture I had an old picture frame with printed out words in the background. In true creepy halloween theme I printed out the words to Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven and pinned them up…

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visiter,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door —
Only this and nothing more.” …

Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore —
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

For the evening’s entertainment portion we had bobbing for apples (which turned into quite the competition!)

And toy prizes for the winners. This year we gave out little parachute men and rubber bouncy balls. The boys at the party immediately decided we needed to test out the parachute army men and proceeded to get the ladder out of the garage and launch them from the roof of the house. See my cute husband dressed as a Super Nerd. (funny story: my neighbor who had never met him before… we’d only been dating a few months… asked if that was his costume or what he always looked like, but don’t worry, I love my super nerd!)

The night quickly turned into a spontaneous dance party in the kitchen, for which I’ll spare all of the attendees from having their dancing pictures plastered all over here. But I’ll leave you with one last picture of the night, this is me and my twin brother. He’s dressed as Michael Jackson and I’m dressed as a flapper girl. And major props to my mom and her friend who made my costume a few years ago for another Halloween party I hosted.