Meals for Young Cooks:
Halloween Party

By Ruth H. Lundgren

Halloween is a good time for you and your friends to get together for a dress-up party! Your invitations, decorations, refreshments, and activities can all be centered around a Halloween theme.

Invitations

You will need black, white, and orange construction paper, scissors, glue, black felt-tip pen, and white pencil. Trim black paper to fit a standard-size envelope. Then cut a picket fence out of white paper and glue it on the black paper. Pumpkin faces, with small tabs extending from the top of the stem, are cut from orange paper. Place the pumpkins so that the tabs extend beyond the top edge of the card and glue the tabs to the card’s back side. With white pencil or ink, print a message giving the details of the party under each pumpkin face.

Place Settings

Jack-o’-lanterns can be made out of thick-skinned oranges by cutting off their tops a quarter of the way down and hollowing them out. Then cut eyes, nose, and mouth with a paring knife. Place a tiny birthday candle inside each one.

Your guests will enjoy a small ghost favor made from a white paper napkin wrapped around a large lollipop. Tie a name tag around each spook’s neck with a black bow. Complete favors by drawing two round eyes or by gluing on eyes cut from construction paper.

To determine who will go first in the games, make a spinner that looks like a clock. Draw numbers on the bottom of a paper plate and attach a cardboard witch’s broom to the center for a pointer.

Refreshments

A delicious cake can also serve as a centerpiece for your table until your guests are ready to eat. Place a pound cake in the center of a cardboard box lid, and decorate it to look like an abandoned house by creating cracked walls and broken windows with brown frosting. Add a cardboard roof, a few cardboard gravestones, clean dry tree twigs, and a rickety cut-out cardboard fence for the finishing touch.

Complete your refreshments by serving orangeade (dry ice added to the serving “cauldron” will make the drink look like a real witch’s brew), popcorn, and rosy red apples.

Activities

With a little imagination, some of your favorite party games can be turned into Halloween specials. For instance, why not Pin the Tail on the Black Cat or Pin the Witch on Her Broom? A three-legged race could become the Rampage of the Three-Legged Monster, and a balloon bust could be dubbed the Frankenstein Stomp. The music for musical chairs could be a Halloween harmony of spooky sound effects: creaking doors, howling winds, the rustle of bat wings, etc. (Such recordings can be checked out at most public libraries.)

Perhaps you will want to award prizes for the most original, funniest, and ugliest costumes. Or maybe you would rather spend the evening watching a spooky movie, rented inexpensively from the county film library.

Whatever you choose to do, let your imagination go and have a howling good time!

Illustrated by Mary Garlock