Halloween: Spooktacular Family Fun Night

Every year our ward has a Halloween carnival sometime the week before Halloween. This year it was bigger and better than ever!

My friend Aimee was the mastermind behind much of the event, but she really did an excellent job of rallying all the different leaders in our ward to pitch in and take responsibility for part of the night. I've really never seen the church auxiliaries work together better to put on an activity for the entire ward.

The night began with a chili cook-off dinner. Anyone who chose could enter a chili and then everyone dished up and voted on their favorite. The people in charge of the dinner decorated our gym so festively with garlands and lights running down the tables and they played a slide show of past church costume parties. The smartest thing they did for the chili cook-off was to have little cups instead of large bowls on the buffet table. Then you could take a little sample of each chili without having too big of a serving.

Once dinner was complete, all the young kids lined up and received punch cards. Then they were let loose to visit different rooms and activities around the church building. They could visit each room as many times as they wanted, but the punch cards meant they could only get a prize/treat once for each stop.

Here's Adah waiting to go fishing in the room run by Zorro (or the elders quorum president in disguise).

The other Sunday School teachers and I were in charge of the beanbag toss. A couple of us decorated the room (plastic dollar store table cloths go a long way) ahead of time and one of the teachers with no young kiddos ran the game on the night of the activity.

The Relief Society ran a cookie walk (like a cake walk, but with less-crumby winnings).

There were several other rooms, like gourd bowling and bobbing for donuts (on strings hung from the ceiling, not in tubs of water), run by the other auxiliaries. Everyone decorated their own rooms and then ran the activity that they were assigned by Aimee.

The star of the evening was the fun house created in our primary room, which has more than one door and thus allowed for an entrance and exit.

Below is Aimee, aforementioned Spooktacular Family Fun Night mastermind, inside the first section of the fun house.When she went looking for large pieces of cardboard to divide up the primary room into different areas, someone offered pieces leftover from another church's Vacation Bible School, suggesting Aimee could just use the back sides. They ended up being painted in these amazing circus scenes, so she decided to just use them (see also the clowns in the Sunday School room above).

In the fun house, kids went through a balloon-filled area and then down a slide; next they crawled through a "bat cave" (a tunnel made by putting small tables end-to-end and then covered with the fabric from an old trampoline). Then they walked across a plank bridge above some "hot lava." (I didn't see that part--my butterfly wings didn't allow me to fit in all the spaces.) Finally they came out through a "lily pond." The photos below don't quite do it justice. The first photo was taken with the flash, so you can see the tulle, frogs, lily pads, and cattails that created the scene. The second photo, without flash, gives you a little idea of the effect created with the overhead lights off and the whole room just lit by some blue and white Christmas lights.
The fun house was so spectacular in its inception and execution. The kids were delighted and all the adults were impressed. Such a fun way to celebrate Halloween!

At the end of the carnival games, we were supposed to have a Trunk-or-Treat in the parking lot, but it was raining hard and super cold, so everyone took a corner or a doorway and the children Trick-or-Treated through the hallways.

We were so happy to have an indoor, Saturday alternative for this year's wet and chilly Sunday Halloween. We chose not to go Trick-or-Treating on Sunday, and so the kids didn't have to be around while everyone else was out on Halloween night, we spent Sunday evening with friends who live outside of town, munching on popcorn and cookies and then venturing out to see dozens of expertly-carved jack-o-lanterns at the home of a family in our ward.

Overall--lots of fun for our family this Halloween!