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Home › Articles › Holiday: Halloween › Playing Halloween Hostess

Playing Halloween Hostess

Success Strategies for Party Planning

By Koren Wetmore

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Throwing a Halloween party – or any party – for a group of preteenagers proves challenging. They're easily bored, quick to complain and desperate to look cool.

So what's a parent to do?

Keep it simple and recruit help, says Sharron Werlin Krull, author of That Was the Best Party Ever!

"Get your kids involved at every level," Krull says. "Have them do the planning, the shopping and the hosting along with you. Encourage them to develop games and activities. But if what they choose is inappropriate, you need to say something like, 'No, firecrackers won't work here.'"

Establish Limits
Parties are not marathons, Krull says. Adults and kids can get tired if the festivities run too long. Plan on entertaining for two hours, playing two or three games and serving basic foods built around your theme. Make party boundary lines clear, keeping the kids in the house, in the backyard or in a certain area of a park.

Also decide how you will handle negative behavior. "[Preteenagers] love to test authority," Krull says. "You may have a child that refuses to do an activity or who objects to how you play the game. Give them choices. Say, 'This is how we are doing it here. You can be in the audience or you can join in.'"

Set the Mood
Create a spooky atmosphere with props such as fake eyeballs floating in the punch or skeleton hands sticking out of the cake. Play games like "Fling the Foot," which is similar to baseball, except instead of hitting a ball, the "batter" throws a fake body part before running the bases.

The grosser, the better, Krull says, when planning for 10- to 12-year-olds. Children this age enjoy the creepy play, without taking it too seriously.

Food
Give new names to familiar foods. Shoestring potatoes become "bat bones," red punch becomes "vampire's blood." Even utensils can take on new identities such as witch's broom (fork), gravedigger (spoon) and Jack's ripper (knife), says Mary Ann Ross, owner of The Party Works in Chewelah, Wash.


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