Hallowe'en Party!

The first blog of a new month and I have to document our smash of a Hallowe'en Party! Having sensed a definite lack of talk about trick-or-treating on the streets of Melbourne in the weeks leading up to October 31st, we took it into our over-achieving-Canadians-with-time-on-our-hands hands to host a party for some of the kids and families who we have met over the past few months.

The build up was monolithic and included three trips to local malls, late night decorating and pumpkin carving, and even an effort on my part to effectively re-create cows brains with frozen cooked fusili! We were feeling the pressure! Having talked up Hallow'en in the schoolyard as something Canadians proudly "get into" we didn' t want to let the home side down. How could we invite 20 Melbournians into our home for what might be their first Hallowe'en Party ever and serve up a lame ghost costume and a few cheese doodles? No, no, no! This was going to be a party for the ages! This was going to be a party they would never forget! At least, that's what I was thinking.

Where do I begin. There were two lovingly hand-carved pumpkins - Japanese pumpkins that are smaller and tougher (or maybe it was the butter knife I was using) - the traditional "Canadian-style" were nowhere to be seen. We had a flying vampire with light up eyes and spooky voice. We had downloaded sound effects with chains and wolves and screaming witches. There was a tonne of spiderwebs, spiders, and a particular lifesize skeleton seated on the couch with a large sword sticking from his gullet. There was tonne of food and lollies and wine and punch and cakes and beer...

Colin and Alex were into it from the "get go" and had us decorating days before the big day. Colin was going as a weird, dead soldier guy and Allie was a very cute skeleton. Linton was her ever evil witch with pink hair this time and I was some sort of rapper/soccer dude with some bling and bad teeth. Definitely weird but maybe not scary.

Not wanting to have a bunch of nine and ten year olds trashing the rental for two hours, I dreamed up a few hours of activities and games. There was a quiz, a story, some monster drawing, the monster mash, an eyeball toss, guess the gross thing and pin the tail on the werewolf. I think they were a hit and managed to keep the damage to a minimum though my beautiful skeleton was trashed within 10 minutes of the party starting.

By 6:00 pm it was all over and we were bidding the last few guests a Happy Hallowe'en. Our close-to-next-door neighbours stayed a little longer for another glass of wine and a chance for their two sons to have a bit of a dance party with C and A. There would be no late night trick-or-treating this year, and no mountains of candy that would last 'til Christmas. But what we would have is the memory of our first and very fun Australian Hallowe'en party.