Halloween Party!!!

Marlena, the dead safety patrol. Thanks for saving my life at this Halloween Party, Marlena!  I couldn't have done it without you!

A beautiful pirate.

A Ninja with swagger.

Menu:

Graveyard salad bar. Mud (chocolate pudding), dirt (1/2 box chocolate Teddy Grahams, smushed), gummi worms, candy pumpkins, gruesome sprinkle candies from the dollar store.

Candy served in a black plastic goblet placed in a black cauldron. Add hot water to the cauldron and then drop a few small cubes of dry ice in. (Dry ice tips: break up into smaller chunks; it stops bubbling when its coated with frozen water, and that doesn't happen as quickly if you use a lot of little chunks instead of one  big one. I forgot to add green food coloring to the water, which would have made it bubble green vapor.) Big hit with the kids, of course, who accused me of trying to poison them, although they still, fascinated, reached through the dry ice vapors for the eyeball candies.  Marlena passed it around for me.

Witches' Toes. Cocktail franks look pretty disgusting right out of the package, but when you slice out a little nailbed from one end and decorate with blood red barbecue sauce, no Tinkerbell will touch them. Very tasty; full of protein and nitrates.

Craft:  Using permanent marker on styrofoam plates, the kids then attached white garbage bags cut into strips to the bottom. The finished product was a ghost with a nice swishy body who could hang outside.  The faces were very scary this year. The one I made was an innocent little surprised ghost, but I saw a lot of teeth on the ghosts they drew.


Story:  After the kids were all cranked up on sugar, I gathered them up for the last ten minutes for a ghost story.  They loved it!  It was my favorite The Man Who Tricked a Ghost by Laurence Yep, and they were a great audience.