A Halloween party hosted by a club or restaurant is a great way to be entertained, but not necessarily for those who prefer to do the entertaining themselves.
ves. And sometimes hosting your own party is just necessary, given how hard it can be to find a babysitter on the second-biggest party night of the year. Doing so is easier than you might think.
Crypt keeping
One of the most important things at a Halloween party is setting the proper mood. You can’t encourage hauntings with bright lighting, so turn the lights off and fire up as many candles as you can without setting fire to anything in the process. Drape gauze over armchairs, pictures and tables, and create a sense of foreboding by writing “BEWARE” on the bathroom door in ketchup or some other viscous red liquid. (Your own blood? We don’t recommend it.) Mildly sophomoric, but fun, jokes on friends can be had by creating fake cardboard tombstones for them, complete with epitaphs (for examples, see www.howl2000-.com/Epitaphs). Hang black cardboard bats from the ceiling or in the windows, so that they’re visible outside.
Carving a jack-o-lantern
Every Halloween party demands a demonically smiling candle-lit jack-o-lantern in the window or near the front door. It does double duty, both welcoming visitors and warding off evil spirits. We’re obliged to pass along a grandmotherly warning: no one under the age of, say, 14 should be butchering a pumpkin unless he or she is accompanied by an adult.
Finding a pumpkin at a local market should be no problem now, so simply choose a nice, well-rounded one that’s uniform in color. If you didn’t have a North American childhood, here’s how to carve your new gourd:
Spread newspaper on your kitchen floor (it’s going to get messy) and arm yourself with a two knives (one large, one small), a strong spoon or other scooping device, and a black felt marker. With the big knife, carve a hole in the top large enough to get your hand inside. Be sure to cut at an angle so that the top will safely rest on top the pumpkin when replaced, and won’t fall in.
Next, scoop out all the guts using the spoon and separate the seeds (to be toasted later). Rinse the seeds off and set them on paper towels to dry. Once the insides have been scooped out, use the felt marker to draw a mouth, nose and eyes across the widest section of the pumpkin, making the holes big enough to get the small knife into without too much trouble.
Carve the face carefully and discard the loose pieces, or save them for pumpkin pie. Once the face is perfected, light the jack-o-lantern by placing a candle inside the pumpkin. For ultimate safety, put the candle first inside a glass jar, then into the pumpkin, but make sure the top of the pumpkin has been made big enough for both candle and jar. (For wild carving design suggestions, see www.extremepumpkins.com.)
Ghoulish gastronomy
A quintessential Halloween night treat is the candied apple. You won’t find these treats at Kyivan shops, but you can make them at home. Three dashes of cinnamon, three cups of white sugar, one cup of water, a dash of red food coloring and about eight washed apples are all you need.
Heat the first four ingredients in a saucepan, then dip the apples into the hot, melted mixture, rolling them around to coat them well. Then simply cool the candied apples and serve. That’s it.
Traditional Halloween punches are also easy to make. For hot apple punch, blend in a saucepan 1 liter of apple juice (preferably unsweetened); the juice of half a lemon; and one teaspoon each of cinnamon and sugar. Cook it on the stove over low heat and serve in a heat-resistant bowl when it’s sufficiently warm enough.
For an icy punch, mix together 1.25 liters each of orange and grape juice with 2 liters of lemonade and then add ice. And to make any punch scarier, take a clean rubber glove, fill it with water and set it in the deep freeze. When it’s hard, peel the glove off and put the ice mould in the punchbowl in place of regular cubes. Punches can also be made more challenging, of course, if not scarier, by liberal applications of vodka or rum.
Need more ideas? Check the Web. Happy Halloween, and try not to hurt yourself.
