http://www.arcamax.com/halloweenOne of the articles that you'll find at the above link is
Decorating Outside Your Home for Halloween
Nicola Kennedy
When I read the article it reminded me of a great party!
One of my favorite Halloweens was when my husband and I were laid off from work. We didn't have much money but we had lots of time to plan a great party. First we picked our apples and the apples that grew down at my Mom's house that mostly got nothing more done to them then making apple sauce a few times or just picked off the tree and ate when they were ready. We took them to a local apple press and got 25 gallons of apple cider for like 25 or 50 cents a gallon including the plastic jugs. We collected up all the old broken crayons, paraffin, old candles pieces that we could find and made new candles out of them in old beer nuts cans that we put into more old plastic jugs and our pumpkins. We had lots of pumpkins to decorate with from our garden. We had a huge dish of pumpkin seeds that we dried and salted from all the pumpkins that we had made into jack-o-lanterns. We borrowed a hay wagon from one of our farmer friends that we hooked up to our tractor got some bales of hay for people to sit on and took a hay ride around the "country block" in our neighbor hood. Then we all came back from the hay ride and had a big bonfire were we toasted marsh mellows and made some-mores and cooked some hot dogs. Then we went on a spooky walk in the back yard that we had lighted with the jack-o-lanterns to mark the path for people to follow along. The path went through our double hedge row that we had trimmed the middle out of and hung up scary spiders and things that we had made. We made the spiders out of yarn and pipe cleaners and some big ones we made out of paper mache. They were fun to make and looked great! We started out with balloons and covered them with strips of paper that we had soaked in homemade flour paste, let them dry and then painted them. We rolled up news paper to use for the legs for the spiders and pasted them right on the balloons as we added the strips of paper. They held up really well and we were even able to store them and use them over again other years. We had a whole roll of plastic drain pipe that we had gotten for drainage for the barn that we hadn't installed yet. We painted spots on the pipe and weaved it back and forth through the hedge. When you got to the end of the hedge row, the "drain pipe" with spots had a giant snake head on it that I had made out of a large box that I cut at an angle so that the "mouth" was open with a big red tongue and teeth stuck out. The back of the box had a hole cut in it to fit over the drain pipe. Then painted the box head and decorated it with strips of paper. We used fake spider webbing to go along with the spiders. After that we all went back to the garage we had it all decorated up and had borrowed a few tables we had set up for stuff people brought as covered dishes. We had some sloppy Joe's and barbecued ham sandwiches we kept hot in crock pots. And had plenty of hot and cold cider to drink. We made up some games we played. We had everyone bring their own lawn chair for seating along with the hay bales. Almost everyone dressed up for the party and it was just loads of great fun. A wonderful memory for everyone.
