Sound Effects for your Halloween Playlist

Whenever I plan our Halloween parties I spend a lot of time finding the right music for the evening. My playlist is usually rock music which have titles befitting Halloween. Like Elvis Presley with "Devil in Disguise", Blue Oyster Cult "Don't Fear the Reaper", or "Highway to Hell" featuring ACDC. For that extra Halloween flavour I sprinkle the playlist with a generous amount of creepy sound effects. E.g. a howling wolf, creaking doors, screams, boos and what have you. Here is a great link that I just stumbled across today while looking to update the sound effects on my Halloween playlist.

http://scarstuff.blogspot.com/2006/02/haunted-house-music-company-haunted.html

The Importance of having a Theme - or a baby happened

Well, I was going to write about the importance of having a theme for ones Halloween party. However, today my just turned 2-years-old daughter refused to take her nap due to teething issues. Screams, tears and snot. It reminded me of our 3rd Halloween party. Despite the fact that we were 1st time parents, had a daugter who refused to sleep and thus had kept us awake for the almost 2 months that she had been in our lives, I insisted on throwing a Halloween party. I did scale it down a bit to only 6 adults and had the guests bring a pie each. And some of them even brought a cake. Oh bliss. I decorated our apartment a week before the party, made an easy entree and bought icecream for dessert. Our theme for the evening was The Dark Side of the Fairytales. I dressed up as a down-and-out Cinderella re-using the slit throat from 2 years before. My husband was Prince Charming with a scissor in his forehead. Our story was that we did not live happily ever after and had had a fight in the kitchen which ended up with me sticking a scissor in him while he was slitting my throat. The night went great, except my husband spent most of the night with a baby on one arm. Our daughter would as usually not sleep so she was with us for the entire evening. We were so tired that by midnight we could barely stay awake in our chairs. Our guests pitied us and put us out of our misery by leaving early. We forgot all about taking pictures. As the guests were leaving I suddenly remembered, so I took a couple of fuzzy pictures of them exiting. I got a picture of my very tired husband in costume with our daugter hanging on his arm. Before demasking I took a picture of myself in the bathroom mirror, which was covered in fake cobwebs. That picture was even more fuzzy. The next year we got our mom to babysit for Halloween. Fingers crossed she will do the same this year.

Living in Oblivion

When I was a kid nobody celebrated Halloween. It did not exist. In Denmark - the small country in northern Europe - it was all about Christmas. No monsters in the closets, no tombstones in the front yards, no ghosts trick-or-treating in the night, no jack-o'-lanterns flashing their toothy grins in the dark. And boy how I would have loved it. From an early start I loved monsters, witches and ghost stories. If it was scarry it was good. As I grew up I began hearing tales about a holiday in America that incorporated all of my favorite things. Oh how I hoped it would come to Denmark. But it didn't. Not really. A few years ago the stores began selling plastic spiders, cobwebs and ceramic jack-o'-lanterns in October. That was about it. So, taking matters into my own hands I decided to throw a Halloween party. I got my sister - who lives in California - to send me some Halloween decor and fake blood. Decorated our home, got dressed up as a 1960s housewife with a slit-throat while my husband was a shot-in-the-head gangster from the 1930s. Our friends - who had never been to a Halloween party before - came dressed as pirates, devils, witches and monsters. It was a blast. And so a tradition was born. This year we will be hosting our 5th year anniversary Halloween party.