# How was your party last night?



## hauntedgraveyard (Sep 8, 2008)

I hope everyone had a great time!

We had a few guests show up early! That's a first. They were very happy to help chop some veggies and stuff. A neighbour showed up in the morning asking if he could make a "scary" dish. He made a severed arm - it was fabulous! I generally don't ask people to bring anything, as I make lots of food. But he really hit it out of the park with his creation. I have to find my camera, I did take a photo.

Just about all the food went, only a couple of chicken wings and a bit of chilli left. 

Everyone showed up that I expected, I wish I would get RSVPs earlier though.

We didn't t do a game this yer, everyone was too busy eating an socializing. 

It was great that a lot of the clean up happened about 2am the last guests helped clear things away. Amazing what a bunch of people can do I. 10 minutes.

No bad drunks or drama. I think everyone had a great time!


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## matrixmom (Oct 29, 2010)

You truly had the perfect party!


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## Paint It Black (Sep 15, 2011)

Nice! What great guests. Glad you had a good one. 

The whole RSVP thing seems to be almost out of fashion these days.  Drives me crazy.


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## Ghouliet (Nov 5, 2010)

I put RSVP on my invitations this year and had people call me when they did they also asked what they could bring. This will be the first year my guests are bringing food. We will see how it goes.


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## matrixmom (Oct 29, 2010)

Me too! I hate when people forget. I just need it for a food ordering.game play......



Paint It Black said:


> Nice! What great guests. Glad you had a good one.
> 
> The whole RSVP thing seems to be almost out of fashion these days.  Drives me crazy.


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## Trinity1 (Sep 5, 2009)

Haunted graveyard so happy to hear that all went well last night. Ours went really well too. We had a great turn out. It worked out well too because we had a group of people show up right on time.....then another group came later after the first group thinned out. Our house is very tiny so it actually made it more comfortable. 


Of course we were running around right up to the start time...but I'm really happy with everything we got done. Already thinking about next year!! I think instead of inviting a ton of people next year, we're going to keep it much smaller and only have really close friends. Already have a theme in mind. . Muhahahaha


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## Halloween Scream (Sep 29, 2010)

Our party went well this year! We were so well prepared for once that everything was ready to go early, and we were a lot less stressed out. Good group of people, about 35 guests and no cancellations or no-shows. Of course I'd always like to see a few more people RSVP "yes", and I don't like how I have to ask so many what their answer is after the reply by date. No drama (last year we had a full out fist fight), had a great core group stay late for a dance party, and two neighbors stayed until the end to help put everything away. Very happy how it went, but glad it's over and looking forward to relaxing this week for sure!


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## Chewbacca (Oct 12, 2010)

Our party went well as well. We had about 40 or so guests, I lost track so I'm not sure of the total. We have very limited parking and a long dark driveway so we had some friends telling people where to park and then shuttling them down to the house. I do know that there were 22 cars and we had asked our guests to carpool if at all possible so the minimum per car was two I don't think there were any singles and I know there were a few with 4. Almost everyone came in costume which was a first.

The only problem we had was a few people showing up about 45 minutes early so we put them to work helping with the last minute prep.


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## dixiemama (Sep 28, 2010)

Our 4th annual party went very well. The weather cooperated but was a little cooler than planned. Thank goodness for the fire, booze and dance floor to keep us warm! We played a game that I made up this year, I posted it a couple of weeks ago titled Games for large crowds if you want to see it. We had around 60 people. We were expecting 75 but was happy with the turnout. We did not require RSVP's this year. We had a fairtytale theme and our house was the Hansel and Gretel witch house so we served "children stew" (beef stew), it was a huge hit. Everyone dressed in theme related costumes and they really did a great job! The DJ, Dance floor, lights, fire and indoor / outdoor decor was a hit as always. I will post pictures. Thanks to all of the great ideas I find here we have had great success so far!


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## hauntedgraveyard (Sep 8, 2008)

Sounds like there were some great parties on Saturday! 

I envy those of you that have warmer weather for outdoor parties! Lucky!


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## ChrisW (Sep 19, 2006)

Nice to hear so many gatherings turned out well. We were very happy with how ours turned out. I started another thread about it - "The Blob!". Alot of issues - and non-issues - that others mentioned we can relate to. Last year was drama galore - a drunk guest had to be driven home, almost an hour away, and then we returned to clean and take down the outdoor decorations because Sandy was coming to pay us a visit the next day. By comparison, this year was a (trick or) treat.


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## Skull and Book Press (Sep 12, 2013)

My library party was a success -- everyone loved the musical guests, and we ran out refreshments (always a good sign). Now I can relax and enjoy the last few days of the season without any major obligations!


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## BillyBones (Aug 17, 2011)

Was a good time, invited twenty plus had twelve. Food was a hit everyone loved my Chili (As always) Thai chicken salad was also a big hit. Now to get everything down for Christmas


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## Megoween (Aug 2, 2013)

Our first-ever Halloween party was a big success. Here are my experiences of how the evening went, and what we'll do differently next time.

Here in Belgium, Halloween is something that people have seen a lot of in the movies, but haven't had much opportunity to celebrate themselves, so we had a very curious audience. (I am American, so me hosting the party gave people the promise of a 'real American Halloween'.) I think everybody had a great time and will hopefully want to come back next year.

One thing I did in the initial party announcement on Facebook was emphasize the importance of costumes. I knew if I didn't emphasize it that people would probably not dress up or put much effort into it, and I think it's really important for the evening's atmosphere. Everybody who attended really rocked it and went all out with amazing, creative costumes.

I sent out Evites as well, because not everybody looks at Facebook invites, and then I ended up making paper invitations as well when I realized I wanted to invite people who I didn't know their email addresses at all. Next year I will strictly do paper invites, and personally email the people I know I won't see in person ahead of time. It was way too hard to follow up the RSVP's with 3 different avenues.

Since the weather in Belgium is so terrible at this time of year and our apartment is small, we set out a large party tent in the yard. We invited the neighbor that we don't know so they hopefully wouldn't have noise complaints. And our other neighbors are our friends who were at the party, so that was no problem. 

Another reason I wanted to use the tent was to keep our furniture free of fake blood. And also I like the feeling of a party that takes place all in one space, where everybody is together the whole night.

Wiring the tent for enough electricity was a challenge. We had lighting for both functional and prop purposes, 2 drink refrigerators, a DJ station, a fog machine, and patio heaters....aaaand an upstairs apartment. Luckily we have a private laundry area downstairs as well. We ended up plugging some things into our washer / dryer sockets off of a long extension cord, and running a 50 meter extension cable out to the tent from the apartment so we wouldn't blow any fuses.

I had built a fog machine chiller that I ended up setting just outside the tent because it wouldn't matter if it got rained on, and it saved valuable space to do so. I fed the tubes under the tent to the fog machine itself, and also the tube the smoke comes out of.

What I found about fog machine smoke in a tent, though, is that the smoke is just drawn to the outside of the tent. So it didn't matter how I directed the tubing, the smoke simply drifted towards the edges of the tent. And even with the chiller, the fog rose up into the air too much. It did look nice the way it billowed, but it wasn't what I expected. This was disappointing, because when I had set everything up outside, the chilled smoke did a fantastic job of clinging to the ground for a long time and meandering around the tombstones. I guess the air temperature made a big difference.

We rented chairs and tables. The chairs went largely unused, which was delightful as people were active almost the whole evening. So next year I will rent maybe 12 chairs instead of 32.

We decorated the tent to the nines, as much as is possible inside a party tent that still needs to fit 44 people. 

I had made a small graveyard (tombstones posted in 'Show us your stones' thread) that I had planned on setting up outside the tent (the tent had clear windows in the walls) but my lighting was not yet waterproofed and the weather was rainy. So I arranged them at the back of the tent, which sacrificed some space but ended up being just fine. 

The hardest part about decorating was setting up our Pepper's Ghost prop in such tight quarters. I screwed around with that for probably 2 hours just trying to get the set-up as ideal as possible. I must say this was my biggest disappointment of the evening because when I set it up outside in the yard, it looked fantastic and really mysterious, and inside the tent it was very easy to tell there was a piece of Plexiglass. I will make sure to weatherproof everything involved in this illusion for next year!

I had made two big batches of gumbo and frozen them ahead of time (to give everybody some real American food), and we asked people to bring something along if they could. People ended up bringing a lot of great food. Also, my father in law grilled sausages as well. So I ended up with way too much gumbo on my hands and I'll have to throw a lot of it out, because I can't refreeze it now. 

It was funny having a potluck concept in Belgium because that's not really how it's done here; the party host is generally expected to provide food and drink, so I felt a bit crass asking, but people turned out to be totally on board with it and I'll do it again next year. It's just too costly and time-consuming to provide that much food when we have so much other set-up to do as well, and I don't know how people manage when they do provide everything for so many!

Drinks we did provide. You can order everything from the drinkshop and they will take back anything you didn't open. We got a delivery of 2 big pallets of beer, wine, and soft drinks in small glass bottles (more environmentally friendly because no cups required for soft drinks, and easy for self-serve). We were afraid that we had ordered waaaaaay too much booze when we saw our delivery, but we ended up going through a lot of it. People drank way less wine than expected, a lot of beer (well, this IS Belgium after all), and we blew threw about 10 or 12 bottles of cava as well, an entire bottle of Captain Morgan, and an entire bottle of Limoncello.

Next time we will order more cava, less wine, and the same amount of beer / soft drinks.

The self-service fridges were definitely a good way to go. That way we could have more fun socializing with our guests and just occasionally run around to clear plates and bottles / wine cups. People actually ended up bringing a lot of bonus drinks, which were mostly consumed as well, so if nobody had done that, maybe we would have drunk everything we ordered from the shop.

Our friend DJ'ed for free and he was awesome.

So, all in all, a fantastic, EXHAUSTING experience! Our party was Friday and I'm still trying to recover. 

A few pics of some decor, a mixture of homemade and store-bought:

some table decorations:
















Thrift store paintings that I enhanced to make creepy:















Our Pepper's Ghost in action (his nickname is Skelly):








Our bathroom (sooooo easy and a really great scare for everyone who opened the door! I definitely recommend this for easy and cheap bathroom decor.  )


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