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On Halloween (as the festival eventually came to be known), people thought that they would encounter ghosts if they left their homes. To avoid being recognized by these ghosts, people would wear masks when they left their homes after dark so that the ghosts would mistake them for fellow spirits. To keep ghosts away from their houses, people would place bowls of food outside their homes to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter. Trick or Treating came from a European custom called souling. On November 2nd--All Souls' Day--early Christians would go village to village begging for soul cakes made of bread with currants. The more cakes a person received, the more prayers they would promise to say on behalf of the dead relatives of the donors. At the time, people believed the dead remained in limbo for a time after death and a prayer could send them on to heaven. In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers, than about ghosts, pranks, and witchcraft. At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Today, Americans spend an estimated $6.9 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday. Put some thought and creativity in your invitation to spark your guests' creative side and build anticipation about your party. Make costumes a must, and promise prizes for "Most Complete Transformation," "Most Revolting," "Most Symbolic of True Personality"…you get the idea. To keep things simple, you can send electronic
invitations though a number of greeting card Web sites, or track replies
and feedback online through
www.evite.com. But if you're feeling creative and you have the time,
try this: Take a trip to the local dollar store (a great source of Halloween
decorations) and buy some witches' fingers or severed hands. Print up
your invitation in a spooky font (this one is Chiller, from MS Word),
punch a hole in the paper and use string to tie it onto the finger, or
a finger on the hand. A couple of drops of fake blood would enhance the
gore factor. Depending on the size of your finger or hand, you might need
to send it in a padded envelope. Remember the fear and excitement you felt as a young trick-or-treater trying to approach the scariest house on your block, the one with the life-sized scarecrow on the porch and the eerie music floating into the darkness? If there's one holiday where atmosphere is key, this is it. There are unlimited possibilities for decorating the inside and outside of your home to create tension and make the evening unforgettable for your guests. Start with lighting. Replace many of your regular bulbs with black ones. Fill the house with candles, inside and out (for a gory effect, wrap red wax candles with sheets of white beeswax. As the candles burn, the interior red wax will drip over the white beeswax). Line your walkway with miniature jack-o-lanterns (these can be carved with simple faces or more complex ones using stencils as guidelines).
Next, stretch fake cobwebs (again, a dollar store find) inside and out, and hang a few fake spiders from them for extra effect. Create a bat shadow by cutting a one-inch bat (you can use a small cookie cutter for shape) from black construction paper. Centre over a flashlight and tape it down. Hide the flashlight in a corner of a room near the floor, perhaps in a plant, and aim toward opposite corner of the ceiling. For some table decorations, peel and carve apples
into heads with faces. Let them air dry for a few days and they will turn
into distorted, wrinkled, shrunken heads. These can be scattered around
your food table, or placed on sticks along a walkway to "greet"
partygoers. |
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