Gene Minor's Blog

Halloween is one time of the year when you can enjoy and have fun to your heart’s content. If you have been looking for things to do during the Halloween, then embark on an exciting cemetery day trip in September or October. Plan your weekend trip and head to any of the local cemeteries for exploration and enjoyment.

Just call your friends and form a group. Select the cemetery that you would like to visit and make the plans. You would need to carry some important items with you such as camera, lunch, water, extra batteries, notebook and some pens or pencils. The small and the big cemeteries built in different time periods offer a great weekend getaway for you and your friends. A day trip for Halloween at one of the cemeteries can give you the much needed break from the hum drum of daily life.

Some of the best cemetery locations for exploration are the nineteenth century garden cemeteries, which have several paths for you to stroll around. You can enjoy looking at the different types of stones in the cemetery that are inscribed in different languages. You may enjoy comparing the different symbols such as skulls, faces and other images of the past centuries.

The old colonial graveyards also make for great spots for picnics and sightseeing. Such graveyards are usually much smaller than the normal cemeteries. You will get to see much older stones in these graveyards. The stones consist of epitaphs that speak about the life that was during 17th and 18th centuries.

If you have a passion for photography the graveyard is one of the most exciting places where you can try your creativity. You can click some really unique pictures in the graveyard during the fall and use them for Halloween. The pictures of the cemeteries can also give you ideas for creating your own Halloween attraction at home.

Halloween is all about having fun with your friends and family. Among the best parts of Halloween are decorating the house with hand made crafts. And when these crafts are all hand made, the more the merrier! Halloween festivity really gets enhanced when you walk in to a haunted house full of ghost crafts!

Now I’m sure, you all must be looking for some free Halloween crafts that are easy enough for you to follow and can surely impress your guests! Well, internet is a hub for several ideas. Once you have the ideas and tips and tricks, you can use your innovative skills to make the ideas even more interesting. Creativity and imagination is the key to make your decorations as exclusive and attractive and spooky as you with to.

Here are a few ideas to get started:

1. Tissue Ghosts

This is perhaps the writer’s favorite. Take a piece of Kleenex. Gather it together such that it forms a bulb at the top and the bottom should be splaying out. Shaped almost like a ghost! Now, with a rubber band twist and tie to maintain the shape of the bulb. You can also use a garbage bag for the same. This becomes the ghost’s head. So just tie it as tight as possible! Now grab on a black magic marker to dot in the eyes, nose and mouth. The Kleenex ghost is ready to spook around. You can make loads of these and hang around the house. This would impress your friends & family and friends. You would be able to boast as a Halloween crafts pro!

2. Singing Ghosts

You can make scary balloon ghosts to hand outside the house and add some spookiness to your Halloween. Take 2 white plastic bags. These are easily available at the near by grocery stores or Wal-Mart. Now cut the handles and the written part of these plastic bags. Now start shredding the bottom of the plastic bags leaving away the seams. Try to make 1 inch shreds. Beware that the cuts are around 1 inch away from the seams. Now blow up your balloon & How To Make Your Own Spooky Halloween Crafts make a knot so that it remains inflated. Along with the top knot, now tape 1 bag to the backside of the balloon & 1 bag towards the front. Preferably use black-duct tape s it has quite good grip. Now, draw a ghost face. Tie a string surrounding the knot. The ghost is ready to hang! It can be even more entertaining if you tie some bells at the bottom shreds of the ghost. Now you would hear it haunting in the breeze!

3. Transparent Ghosts

Cut out the shape of the ghost from 2 sheets of wax paper. Now, cut out its eyes, a ghoulish mouth and other effects if you wish to, using construction paper. Next, pick out one of the wax paper ghosts. Lay it on the top of a newspaper. Place its eyes & mouth in the right place. Now sprinkle the remaining portions with glitter. Further, carefully place the remaining wax paper ply in line with the bottom edge of the prior (that is placed on the newspaper). Slowly overlap the lower wax paper ghost and further place a sheet of newspaper on them. Heat the iron at medium level. Run it over the ghost in order to meld the two wax paper ghosts. Finally, shred the extra sparkles from the ghost’s body, and attach a string to the same. Hang this anywhere you feel like and have spooky fun! So, with a little know-how you can make wonderful ghost crafts to make your Halloween special!

Who says Halloween is just for kids? Halloween is, of course, a time for trick-or-treating, and mom and dad certainly canít go out begging in the streets for candy, but the holiday can also be a great time for some adult fun.

If you are planning a Halloween party for grown-ups, you will want to have some adult Halloween games on hand. It is all part of the fun.

Some great adult Halloween games include:

About the Town – This is a scavenger hunt. All you need to do is create a list of Halloween-related items, pass out the list to each team, and send them on their way to collect the items. Some great objects to put on the list include:

A Hangmanís noose
A black veil
An obituary

You get the idea. Just include items that have to do with being scared, ghosts, Halloween, or whatever.

You might try a variation on the hunt, too. One great one is to make the hunt a video scavenger hunt. Each team goes off with video camera in hand (or cell phone with a camera or whatever) and films the items rather than actually bringing the items back with them. This is really cool because you can make the list of items include really big stuff and potentially scary things like tombstones. For a further variation, you can have the list be only things like: Superman, a clown, a pirate, a fairy princess, a werewolf, a vampire, and so on. That would mean the adult Halloween games would include the kids via taking video of trick-or-treaters who are all dressed up.

Halloween Fortune Telling – In this game, your guests put their knowledge of one another to the test and get to know each other better.

Simply hand out slips of paper and a pencil to each guest. Each person then chooses a person at the party (maybe even himself or herself), but doesn’t tell anyone who it is. Then, everyone write a “fortune” for that person, folds it, and puts it into the fishbowl. You can have everyone write one or several; thatís up to you.

Then, each guest pulls out a slip of paper and reads the fortune. He then tries to guess which person wrote the fortune and which person the fortune is about.

Some examples of fortunes might be:

This person will get caught doing something illegal and spend the night in jail.î
This person will marry someone from a foreign country.î
This person will quit his job and buy a Corvette when he turns fifty.î
This person will adopt a child.î
This person will become President of the PTA.î

You get the idea. Each person who correctly guesses wins a small prize, and this game is a delightful way to get conversations started at your Halloween bash.

A really cool variation of this game is to have each guest put their name on a piece of paper and drop into the bowl. Then have each guest draw a name from the bowl and have the one who drew the name make up a scary story about the name drawn. Then have the other guest guess who the scary story is about.

As you can see adult games can be a lot of fun and the types of games can be endless. It just takes a little planning to come up with adult Halloween games.

Whether you decide to take the kids out for an hour of trick-or-treating and then come back for the party, or just forego the neighborhood wanderings this year, it is an absolute must that you have a fiendishly good time by playing Halloween games. This holiday is usually considered a kidís day, but I like to think of Halloween as a time to become a kid again, and Halloween games ñ even if they are really designed to please the kiddies ñ can really be Halloween games for both kids and adults.

Here are some great ideas for Halloween games to make everyone giggle and have a good time:

Pass the Pumpkin ñ This game is great fun and all you need are three pumpkins and some people. Just group up the players into groups of pretty even ability levels, or make it kids against the adults or boys against the girls if you like. Each group starts with a pumpkin and the first player passes it to another in the group. Then that person passes it on to someone else, and so on. The winning team is the team that does not drop the pumpkin. OhhhÖdid I forget to mention, you should put some Crisco on the pumpkins first? Howling good fun! This is an outside game of course!

Mummy Maniacs ñ This game is way cool and all you need is some white crepe paper or rolls of toilet paper. First, divide up the kids (or adults) into teams of two players each. One takes the paper and makes the other one into the mummy, being sure to wrap the legs together, not separately. Then, the non-mummies run around in a roped-off area, and it is the job of the mummies to ìcaptureî an enemy partner. The first one to hug the enemy is the winner.

Witches Broom Dancing ñ This is a variation on follow-the-leader, and all you need is a broom. Put all players in a circle. The first person takes the witchís broom and dances around the circle with it. Then, she hands it to whatever player she chooses, and that person must imitate her dance exactly. If she doesnít she sits down and another person takes a turn. The last player standing wins.

Spider Sack Relay Race ñ This game makes players into spiders and requires just a little forethought and before-the-party preparation. All you need are three old pairs of panty hose and some old rags to stuff inside them. Put the rags in the legs of the pantyhose. Then, divide the players into three teams. The first player ties the pantyhose around his waist so that the legs dangle on his sides. He bends over and crawls on his hands and feet (or hands and knees, whichever) and goes to the finish line, where a teammate waits for him. Then, the teammate takes off the dangly pantyhose spider legs, and puts them on herself and crawls back to the beginning. Play continues until all players have crawled. First team to get everyone across a finish line wins.

Itís easy to become a kid again on Halloween night and make it a special night with your friends and the kids. All you to do is put your thinking cap on and introduce everyone to one of the above games or another Halloween game you come up with.

Many people think that Halloween is a “devil worshipping” holiday celebrated by people who don’t believe in God, but the truth is that Halloween really has its basic origins in the Catholic Church. Halloween means “All Saints Eve” or “All Hallows Eve”.

All Saints Day is a religious holiday observed by the Catholic Church and set aside for worship of all the saints in heaven. They used to consider it with all solemnity as one of the most significant observances of the Church year

The American origin of Halloween extends further from the Celts celebration of Samhain (pronounced sow – in) which is a Druidic festival made to celebrate the end of the harvest. As with a lot of Celtic lore, faeries were thought to be extremely active at this time as they ushered in the winter.

Celts believed that on the night before the “new year”, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31, they celebrate Samhain. It was on this day that they believe the ghosts of the dead returned to Earth causing trouble and damaging crops.

Celts felts that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier for the Druids – Celtic priests – to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the natural world, which could be quite volatile, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winger. During the celebration, the Celts wore costumes – typically consisting of animal heads and skins – and they tried to tell each other’s fortunes. They would build huge sacred bonfires where people gathered to burn crops and animals as sacrifices to the Celtic deities.

When the celebration was over, they re-lit the fires in their hearths which they had put out earlier that evening. The fires would be re-lit with flame from the sacred bonfire to help protect them during the coming winter.

Halloween is one time of the year when you can have lots of fun with your family. Whether, it is designing the Halloween costumes, decorations, and trick-or-treat customs, it brings a wonderful time for the entire family that (thankfully) you may not see in any other time of year. It is necessary to plan everything right for this important occasion, to ensure that the celebration is healthy and safe. Here are some suggestions that you must keep in mind while celebrating Halloween at your home and on the street.

Celebrating Halloween at home:

If you are celebrating Halloween at home, then here are some important things that you must remember and take care of:

Pre plan all your Halloween ideas for your home and children so that everything is safe.
Ensure that the Halloween costumes of your kids are reflective and bright.
Make use of hypoallergenic and non toxic make up for Halloween.
Ensure that the wigs and costumes are all flame retardant.
If you plan outdoor decorations then ensure that they are properly lit as you may have visitors like goblins, royalty, monsters, and superheroes.
The Halloween accessories that you use should be safe and free from hazards.

Celebrating Halloween outside:

You must be really careful when you get out of your home to celebrate Halloween outside. Remember to take good care of your children. When you go out for the main festive event, ensure that you know the route well have a good idea of the location. Keep the right batteries with you for the flashlights. Ensure that your children eat a good meal before they go out to celebrate Halloween. Don’t put your pets outside as they may be scared of the masked people moving outside. Warn your kids against peeping inside other people’s vehicles and homes. Tell them to stay away from dark houses.

Halloween has been bouncing back to the older holiday limelight in the recent years. This old traditional festive occasion now rivals Christmas in popularity among people. In this era with the growing trends of sophistication, the Halloween decoration that mark the nation’s front lawns and porches have become frightfully advanced. The monsters, ghosts, and goblins that are the real make Halloween what it is, have become electrified and inflatable. They soar high up in the sky lighting up the night, shrieking on cue and waving to the passersby.

The advanced technology has made Halloween scarier. But, somewhere down the lane, you may feel a bit nostalgic about the old time charm. All the sophistication that has come into the festival now, makes one long for the cardboard skeleton, and the fun with a few honeycomb tissue-paper pumpkins. You are not alone in craving for the old world charm. This is the reason why the 1920’s till 60’s Halloween decorations are much in demand.

However, finding the Halloween decorations that were used to decorate and display earlier would be tough to find in today’s marketplace. The vintage Halloween images are not easily available. Some of the other collections that have become rare amidst the growing modern trends in Halloween decoration are die-cuts, of archetypal images like spooky black cats, scary witches, plastic pumpkin candy holders, Jack-O-Lanterns, and honeycombed-tissue decorations, to name a few.

The old day decorations and charms were absolutely lost with sophistication of lives and advancement of technology. But, now people are slowly reviving the traditions and old style decorations of Halloween.

Where to find the classic Halloween decorations:

If you also want to join the growing trends of reviving the old style of Halloween decoration then Internet is the best place to get the solution. Thanks to the websites like eBay, searching for the old stuff has become really easy. You can now find classic images and original 1930’s jointed skeleton paper-cutout with lots of convenience.