Desperately Seeking Attention: The Halloween Spooktakular Edition

this week's cookie selection

Yesterday we hosted a kids' Halloween party.  It was a simple affair, requiring me to only spend about 3 full days preparing for it.

As Bee watched me -- exhausted and in a foul mood -- stomping around to get things ready the day before, he sweetly reminded me that all this work for a party was making me look desperate to impress people.

Desperate?  Who; me?!

Does it look like I'm desperate for attention when I decorate a few cupcakes with a Halloween theme?

Does it look like I'm trying to impress people too much when I unsuccessfully spend half a day searching stores for candy shaped like eyes and mouths, and then resort to spending an hour piping my own from Royal Icing?

Do I look desperate when I agonize over party favors and finally settle on a simple skeleton theme that only requires two hours of hard labor to put together?

What?  You think adding little touches, like a line of bugs to the front door, looks like I'm trying too hard?

Desperate.  Hah!

We ended up having about 8 kids of varying sizes attend.  I kept it simple, so we only played two games ("Pin The Monster Under The Bed" and "Ghost Busting" [trying to catch a marshmallow suspended from a string without using your hands]).  Also, we only did two crafts (making the monsters for the "Pin The Monster" game and making monsters out of cookies (with the Royal Icing facial features I'd made).

Mr. C's monsters

And, OK, I may have gone a little overboard in my preparations.  But I was kind of saving time, since the cookie monster bases were ones I needed for this week's Sugarbee Cookie Company selection (see top photo).  And I only made about a dozen cupcakes, and then just cooked up a few frozen pies left over from the Sunday market.  (Which, by the way, was particularly intelligent, since I may have gotten a few holiday pie orders from doing so).  And the bread and pumpkin soup I made didn't take much time, either.

Everyone claimed to enjoy themselves and pretended to be suitably impressed.  For my own part, I was -- as well -- impressed with myself, because I really wasn't into it this year.  Realllllyy.  Which probably explains why, when Mr. C informed me he wanted to be a 'scary witch' for Halloween, all I managed to do was buy a cheap witch's hat from Walmart and wrap a black sweater around his shoulders to act as a cape. 

(Although, to be creative, I did make him first add some glitter glue to the hat for a more personal touch.) 

(Also, although I didn't have to sew the cape at all [YAY!], I fancied it up a bit by using a jeweled hair ribbon as a brooch to hold it onto Mr. C's shoulders.)


I was a little worried he'd look quite feminine as a 'scary witch' but -- seeing as how he only kept the hat and cape on for about 20 minutes, he mostly looked like Dracula/Frankenstein/a monster in his black shirt and pants and green painted face.

So it's a good thing I didn't spend a lot of time or money on his costume.  The hat cost $2.99, and the 'cape' cost 25 cents at a blowout sale.

Know what else cost 25 cents?

ohhh, yeah

Aren't they purty?  Too bad I'm not brave enough to wear them outside of Halloween.  But, even though I didn't plan on it, they worked very well with my costume . . . probably because my costume was just a mish-mash of things . . . but I might have been something like a woodland fairy.

I had collected a bunch of lichen when I was at my parents' last week, so I spent all of 10 minutes shoving pieces onto a headband and gluing some to an old ring before the party started. 

Then I put on a green dress and the 25 cent shoes and called it good.  Oh, except that I also put on some awful green eyeshadow to continue the theme.  (By the way, may I just say that Halloween is a good time of year for those of us who don't know how to apply make-up?  I mean, if we mess up, it just looks like part of the costume!)


So, our costumes may have been a little lame, but at least they weren't as embarrassing as last year's.  And -- anyway -- if our costumes were lame, I blame my mother.  Partly because I am not mature-enough to accept responsibility, and partly because she set the bar too high when I was a kid.  She refused to dress us in store-bought costumes (even though I desperately wanted one), instead insisting on creating beautiful costumes herself.

my brother, in about 5th grade

So now I have an aversion to store-bought costumes, so instead I insist on making costumes myself.  And what is the result?  I usually end up spending twice as much money and eight times as much time to create a costume that looks like shit.

So, thanks, Mom.