This Is Halloween...

In our ward, the ward Halloween party is a BIG deal. It's the biggest event of the year (though I don't really know why). In fact, our ward has garnered a bit of a reputation in the area for our awesome Halloween parties. Really, they go all out!

Brandon and I ended up on the Halloween party committee again this year. It was fun coming up with ideas for the Harry Potter theme they had decided on, but it was stressful to execute. We were in charge of the photo booth and commissioned with somehow turning a cake walk into a game of quidditch. 

I was stationed at the photo booth the entire evening, so I didn't really see anything else everyone had going on, though I did managed to snap a few photos while we were setting up and right before the party began.

The decorations really were quite impressive, and the pictures really don't do it justice. Sorry for the poor quality. They had a real boar's head above the head table and floating candles. They also had a sorting hat, the Forbidden Forest, the Hogwarts Express train ride (apparently with a video and trolley and everything to make you feel like you were actually in a train), the Leaky Cauldron (where they served butterbeer), the "owlry" (where people wrote letters to post to the missionaries serving from the ward), and a number of games, like guessing how many Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans were in a jar.

As I said, we were in charge of the photo booth. Some ward members loaned us black graduation robes and broomsticks as props for the photo booth, and I made magic wands and Harry Potter glasses to go along with them. Other people brought the giant spider and snake.

Brandon and I went as wizards dressed as muggles (what, you couldn't tell from the pictures?), and we posed as photographers from the Daily Prophet  (Get it? Because I was stuck at the photo booth all night...I know, aren't we clever?).

I had a hard time deciding what to dress Oliver up as this year. I love dressing up, but I feel silly spending tons of money or time on an outfit I'm only going to wear for one day a year, and I felt the same way about Oliver's costume. I had some fun ideas: golden snitch, mandrake baby, garden gnome, Mario, Totoro, but none were really sticking. Then a couple of days before the party, I decided I would make good use of Oliver's bald head (I mean, it probably won't be bald next year, right?) and as I was thinking about all the famous people with bald heads (Charlie Brown most prominent), I had a flash of inspiration. 

                 

Baby Aang! We love the cartoon Avatar: The Last Airbender. For a last minute costume using only things I had on hand, I thought it turned out pretty good. Drawing a perfectly shaped arrow on the head of a wriggling one year old is not easy, in case you were wondering.

The cake walk/quidditch game had promise, but kind of failed miserably (according to Bran, who was helping run it). I heard some people thought it was clever and fun, though. It was just too convoluted of a game to play in the short amount of time per game we were allotted. We should have  made it much simpler, or maybe just put our foot down and said we would either do a cake walk or quidditch, not both. When you try and mesh the two, it does not work. If anyone would like me to outline the rules of the game and we came up with and explain the pictures, let me know in the comments and I'd be more than happy to oblige. At least the decorations for the quidditch cake walk were phenomenal, even if our planning and execution were poor, thanks to two ward members who really went all out to make it look fantastic. 

The party was mostly just stressful for Bran and me, but the food was good, and we were glad everybody else seemed to have a fun time. Hopefully next year we will have fun attending the party and not worrying about how to put it on!