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Archive for the ‘Holidays’ Category
Halloween is Just Around the Corner!
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
All Hallow’s Eve is less than a week away, and if you haven’t started planning for the holiday, you may be in a panic right now wondering what costume you will wear, how you will decorate your house, and what to do for the party you promised all your friends. Not to fear! First, take a deep breath and take a look at some of the excellent articles preceding this one. From costumes to harvest festivals, they’ll give you some great ideas to get started on your Halloween celebration no matter how much you’ve procrastinated.
Another quick and easy tip to jumpstart your Halloween planning is to peruse a copy of Karen Jean Matsko Hood’s Halloween Delights. Far more than just a cookbook, Halloween Delights is a treasure trove of ideas that will help you create the most memorable Halloween possible. Packed with innovative recipes that will both delight the tastebuds and send shivers up and down your spine, this book gives you everything you need to quickly develop a theme around which to plan your entire holiday. You will find yourself inspired by just a brief glance at the recipes–there are over 200 to choose from, and they can help create an atmosphere that is spectacularly ghoulish, fun and playful, or anything in between.
For example, you may be inspired to use a monster theme by such treats as Goblin Dip with Bone Crackers and Eerie Eyeballs , or perhaps the Graveyard Cake and Disappearing Ghost Cookies will prompt you to decorate your house as a cemetery and dress up as a haunting spirit. Doubling as both a decorative centerpiece and a tasty treat is the Bleeding Human Heart, a delicious red gelatin that bleeds when you slice it. You could design an entire party around that one item: imagine the lair of a mad scientist, perhaps even Dr. Frankenstein himself, and all the grisly things you might encounter there. Witches, vampire bats, even less frightful symbols of Halloween like the black cat and jack-o-lantern, and so much more can be found in Halloween Delights. You will be thrilled with the abundance of creative ideas, and your party guests will be impressed and delightfully spooked.
Halloween Delights Cookbook – Paperback ©2008
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Halloween Parties
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Perhaps the easiest way to plan any party is to pick a theme and design your food, activities, favors, and decor around that central idea. If you have already chosen a theme for your Halloween decorations, as discussed in our earlier article, why not use this as the theme of your party as well?
For example, if you chose to decorate your house as a spooky graveyard, build on this by serving creepy skeletal treats like Brittle Meringue Bones or create an entire edible cemetery with the Haunted Halloween Forest Platter, both fabulous recipes from Karen Hood’s idea-filled cookbook Halloween Delights. Play Pin the Skull on the Skeleton, bob for apples in a coffin–whatever you do, be sure to include plenty of ghosts, vampires, and other creatures of the night!
A great party idea for younger kids who may frighten easily is to base it on the classic holiday cartoon It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Decorate your house as a pumpkin patch with hay bales and pumpkins; serve pumpkin bars, roasted pumpkin seeds, and pumpkin-shaped cookies as treats; hold a Jack-o-lantern carving contest–and be sure to designate one very special gourd to be the Great Pumpkin himself!
Party ideas for Halloween are almost endless. Invite your friends to a Monster Mash, and you decide whether the theme is traditional Hollywood monsters like The Mummy and The Wolfman, or a more open theme that welcomes all beasts of fur, scale, claw, and fang. A creative costume contest for this party would be a blast. Go with today’s popular trends and throw a vampire party complete with Blood Punch, flitting bat and coffin decor, and party games like Mafia are easily adapted to suit the undead. Another trendy choice is, of course, the zombie apocalypse. A ghoulish game of tag would be the perfect end to the evening.
Harvest Festivals
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Photo by Ethan Miller, Getty Images
Harvest festivals are a wonderful way to enjoy the autumn season for those who do not celebrate Halloween for religious reasons, or who simply don’t like to be scared.
Decorations concentrate on rich fall colors of gold, yellow, orange, red, and earthy brown. Pumpkins, corn stalks, apples, and colorful fall leaves can be incorporated into the décor to invoke a welcoming, harvest atmosphere. You can even go farther and make your home look like a farm—try bales of hay, friendly-looking scarecrows, horse or chicken themed pictures and items, rustic gingham prints, straw hats, and other items that can be found on a farm.
Food should concentrate on traditional autumn fare like apple cider, roasted pumpkin seeds, oatmeal cookies, zucchini bread, caramel apples, and popcorn. Hot, hearty dishes like soup and chili will warm up your guests. Try butternut squash soup as squash is plentiful at this time of year. Don’t forget that Halloween Delights, the fabulous cookbook by experienced chef Karen Jean Matsko Hood, contains a host of delicious and creative recipes that are perfect for autumn, not just Halloween.
Some traditional Halloween activities can be easily adapted to a harvest festival. Bobbing for apples and carving pumpkins are always fun, and you can invite your guests to come in costume as long as they don’t choose anything scary. Wheelbarrow races and other relay games provide excitement and competition for all ages. Carnival games, like beanbag throwing and ring toss, are also popular at harvest festivals, and of course there is the traditional fall hay ride.
Don’t let the frights and commercialism of Halloween stop you from celebrating this gorgeous time of year! A harvest festival is good, clean family fun that will create treasured memories for years to come. Be safe, be creative, and above all have fun!
Halloween Superstitions
Friday, October 14, 2011
- On Halloween, a girl can divine the name of her future husband by paring an apple and tossing the peel over her shoulder. The peel will fall into the shape of the man’s initials.
- If a girl stands in front of a mirror in a darkened room holding a candle, the face she sees in the reflection over her shoulder will be the face of her future husband.
- Black cats were originally thought to protect witches’ power from negative forces.
- To keep spirits away from your house, place a bowl of food outside to appease the ghosts and prevent them from attempting to enter.
- Light a candle to guide your loved one home from the spirit world
- Ringing a bell scares away evil spirits.
- If you see a spider on Halloween night, it could be the spirit of a loved one watching you.
- To meet a witch on Halloween night, put your clothes on inside out and walk backwards.
- Do not look at your shadow in the moonlight. Doing so on All Hallows Eve will guarantee a death in the near future.
- If you see a ghost, walk around it nine times, and it will disappear.
- If you hear 3 knocks and no one is there, it usually means someone close to you has died. This is called the 3 knocks of death.
- If you kill a black cat on Halloween, you will have 7 years of bad luck.
- If you hold your breath while you drive by a cemetery, evil spirits can’t enter your body.
- If a black cat meows on your porch or near a window, a death will soon occur in the family.
- When bobbing for apples, it is believed that the first person to bite an apple would be the first to marry.
- If you go to a crossroads at Halloween and listen to the wind, you will learn all the most important things that will befall you during the next twelve months.
- If a person lights a new orange colored candle at midnight on Halloween and lets it burn until sunrise, he or she will be the recipient of good luck.
- A burning candle inside a jack-o-lantern on Halloween keeps evil spirits and demons at bay.
- If a candle flame suddenly turns blue, there’s a ghost nearby.
- Walk around your home three times backwards and counterclockwise before sunset on Halloween to ward off evil spirits.
- Girls placed hazel nuts along the front of the firegrate, each one to symbolize one of her suitors. She could then find out who her future husband would be by chanting, ‘If you love me, pop and fly; if you hate me, burn and die.’ The nut that popped out of the fire instead of burning up when she named her suitor would indicate her future husband.
- Gazing into a flame of a candle on Halloween night will enable you to peer into the future.
Halloween Decorations
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Decorating your home for Halloween can be as simple or complex as you like. In recent years, companies have created strings of lights that you can hang outside your home like Christmas lights, but in the orange of Halloween. Inflatable yard decorations depicting Jack-o-Lanterns, black cats, and spooky ghosts are another quick and easy way to dress up your yard for the holiday. Carving pumpkins is both a fun Halloween activity and a traditional means of decorating. The flickering glow of Jack-o-Lanterns in the night is always a spooky sight.
If you would like to put more effort into really scaring trick-or-treaters and party guests, design your decorations around a theme. Scary graveyard and haunted house are two of the most popular themes. For a graveyard, buy premade fake tombstones at your local party store or make your own by cutting out and spray painting Styrofoam. Add skeletal remains, open coffins, ghosts and dark spirits hanging from the trees. If you really want to splurge, a fog machine will create fantastic atmosphere, and glowing colored lights placed on the ground will seem eerie in the mist.
The trick to creating a good haunted house is to make it look long abandoned. Spiderwebs, fake bugs and bats, and tattered curtains fluttering in the wind work very well. You can add to this with flickering black candles in the windows, torn wallpaper, old paintings or photographs of people who are obviously long dead—the possibilities are endless. There are dozens of premade items for sale that make decorating on this theme quick and easy, but you can also do it yourself by creating spiderwebs from torn cheesecloth and using baking flour to create fake dust.
Of course, there are many other decorating themes if you use your imagination. A vampire’s lair, witch’s castle, or mad scientist’s laboratory are some other traditional Halloween themes, but why not go for something more unique? Given the current popularity of the Zombie Apocalypse scenario, you could go wild creating a post-apocalyptic look that would thrill trick-or-treaters. No matter what theme you choose, the important thing is to be creative!
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