Halloween Horror - Four Parties In One day
Trick or Treat, trick or treat Halloween’s here, move those feet! Run Away!
When I was a child Halloween was little more than bobbing an apple or two in a bowl of water or dangling one from a piece of string. At that time in England Plot Night on November 5th was much bigger than All Hallow’s Eve. Now, I hear my nephew and niece go out Trick-Or-Treating and Halloween is all the rage. I guess with all its sights and smells there is something to be said for what could well be the oldest European festival though personally I still feel trick or treat is a form of extortion. But beyond that, it is just bloody, hard work! Preparing and running Halloween parties is tough! Here’s what we did at Wise Hat English this year. I write we, though Hideko, my wife, did the lion’s share of the work, as well as the witches’ and the elves’. I just got the bloody knees.
So far, we’ve done a school Halloween Party three times and each time we’ve used our school, which is a trailer home. The children expect us to have a tunnel in the loft of the trailer and this year was no exception. Because the trailer has white walls creating a dark tunnel is a challenge, especially if one wants to avoid using pins. Having a child skewer themselves on a lose drawing pin while crawling in a black tunnel doesn’t bare thinking about. We settle for taping bin bags to the walls and ceiling and also over the shelves that we use for storage. We probably spend as long taking the tunnel down as we do sticking it up in an effort to keep the bags, still the un-environmental nature of black plastic haunts me. Paper just doesn’t hang right. For decorations we use laminated clip art, which is reusable. To give an idea of what the tunnel is like here is a version of the video we made to show the children at the party before they went up:
Being in a trailer the space we have is limited. We need to make sure children only move around in small groups. The best way to do that seems to give them name badges with different Halloween symbols on them. This year we made groups of 2-3 and prepared them in advance. When it’s time for children to go trick-or-treating or up the tunnel we just create the running order randomly by drawing a duplicate sticker from a bag or the like.
When I do parties I like the games to create a story or at least go with the theme. So this year after our opening toast (always done mainly as a photo opportunity) a drink and a muffin we had a silhouette guessing game. The aim was to get six hanging jack-o-lanterns to our "pumpkin drop" chute. The story was simply to go into the tunnel, get a pumpkin from the pumpkin king and roll it down the chute to be caught in a basket below. I never said it clearly but the idea of the first game was to "activate" the chute. After this the next game was Halloween Escape. By winning the game everyone got the right to do trick-or-treat. Wise Hat trick-or-treat is a trick-or-treat in miniature. In groups children would go to the door of the room, knock and chant. Meanwhile, I was in the corridor changing costumes. My favourite this year was the butcher who open the door and tried to give away a severed head (actually an Einstein mask) by mistake. "Sorry, sorry, just doing some cooking" I was happy that some children got the joke.
Following trick-or-treat it was tunnel time. This year it was introduced by Mrs Witch, a character quite similar to the mouse from "Bear and The Big Blue House". The drawback with the tunnel is that children are kept waiting for their turn and their turns are necessarily short. This year the solution was to put a video camera in the "Pumpkin King room" and connect it to a large TV downstairs in the party room. Most children got an extra kick out of leering into the camera and both the TV and the task of catching dropping pumpkins gave the waiting children something to do.
After the tunnel the party would end. We’d gather everyone for a group photo and take two or three photos featuring different expressions. "On a count of three everyone be scared. Three, two, one, Ooeh!"
The bloody knees, I mentioned at the beginning? A couple of hours crawling with bare knees will do it every time. Here they are after a few days recuperation. Next year, I think I might dress up as a roller bladder.