Halloween Party How-To

For us at 2 Ladies and a Chair, Halloween parties are the most fun parties to organize, especially if they're extra-spooky! It's really easy to throw a Halloween party if you keep it simple.

For our Halloween party last year, first we developed a theme and stuck to it. Our theme was a "haunted house in New Orleans."

The first thing we did was collect all our candles - regular candles, flameless candles, every kind of candle you can imagine, and put them everywhere. We also simplified the decorating by selecting a color palette of black, white, and silver.

Since we were turning the home into a haunted house, we decided to make it look like it was abandoned by covering all the pictures with newsprint, and we covered all the furniture with white sheets just before the party started.

The whole house was decorated to theme, and the main entertaining area was made to resemble a library. We hoisted a skeleton up on a table so when the partygoers came in when the room was crowded, they could still see him as the main decoration.

Scattered around the room were pages torn out of old useless books, and on the newsprint-wrapped picture frames we taped spooky photos of friends and family taken with the iPhone app Photo Booth.

These photos were taken during the daytime, but trust me, at night with only candlelight and a couple strategically-placed uplights, these decorations had a very eerie feeling indeed.

Plastic roses from the dollar store were painted black and placed around the house, and we also set up this "coffin" with a random picture we found online.

And of course, spiderwebs and spiders were also placed everywhere.

When the guests first arrived on the front porch, they were greeted by multitudes of jack-o-lanterns, candles, and a hidden iPod playing the traditional Bach organ music associated with every old haunted house movie, "Toccata and Fugue in D Minor." In the bathroom we also hid an iPod that was playing a recording of a thunderstorm and rain. To complete the New Orleans theme, a big pot of gumbo was on the stove, served with steamed rice, and we also had bread pudding with whiskey sauce for dessert. Guests were asked to bring their "spookiest" bottles of wine to share, and of course, costumes were mandatory.

We hope that you'll be inspired to throw your own great Halloween party this year, especially since it's on a Friday night!