It's the most horrifying time of year. What better excuse for a party?

by Jennifer Matthews

Halloween is the one time of year when you can really let your imagination run wild. Invite your friends and neighbors over to commemorate the event in truly horrifying style!
Read on for tips about invitations, decorating, food, and of course, SPIRITS.

History:
Halloween's origins date back to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain (pronounced "sow-in"). The day marked the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.

	Halloween Party ideas history invitations decorations music and mood food drinks

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.

Invitations: Get your guests in the mood

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.

Decorations: Haunting your house

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.