Halloween arrived at our house just in time for our party on Saturday.  But before I jump into a few details about that, I wanted to show you an updated photo of our front door with the trim painted Onyx, to match the door (and the kick plate removed).  We love it so much more and it will surely tide us over until that dutch door comes into our lives. Also, biggest pumpkin ever! It was $28, but worth every penny in our book.  Hopefully it will last through Thanksgiving out there.

Inside, for the party, we had six more pumpkins displayed on our food spread that Chris put together.  I’m kicking myself for not snapping a photo with my actual camera, but this pic from my phone will have to do. We put a bunch of different size boxes on our counter before covering it with a black halloween-esque cloth we actually used as our photo backdrop for last year’s party.  On every surface there was either a dip or something to be dipped.  This was our second year going the all-things-dippable route because it is a crowd pleaser and easy to prep ahead of time.

For the dippable items, Chris prepped fruit (apples, bananas, and strawberries), honey wheat pretzels (which are good to dip in something sweet or savory), veggies (cucumbers, red peppers, celery, broccoli, cherry tomatoes, and carrots), pita chips, ruffled chips, tortilla chips, crackers, and sliced baguettes.  He also made all the dips besides the dill dip, which we just picked up at the store. Chris busted out salsa, a hawaiian dip (think pina colada in dip form), guacamole, hummus, an onion dip, and the hot caramel and chocolate dips were on the other counter next to the drinks so they could stay warm  in little crockpots. The major difference between the dip spread last year and this year (besides more, more, more! that Chris) was I learned from last year’s mistake of not labeling the dips ahead of time. Last year, after the 4th person asked me what a certain dip was–understandably, I whipped up quick little cards that I stuck next to each hollowed out pumpkin with the dip name on it.

This year we stuck with the hollowed out pumpkin because it is just too festive to pass up, but carved out a label on each. To get the job done, I broke out one of my old pottery tools from college. It wasn’t as sharp as the ones you see the pumpkin sculptors using on tv (Halloween Wars, anyone?) but the roughness only added a somewhat spooky effect you would look for in a Halloween font, I think.

And just as a side note, if you aren’t making homemade root beer, complete with smoking dry ice for your Halloween party–start now. If nothing else, the kid dressed up as Harry Potter will go nuts over it.

Our parties don’t really have games or activities–besides a costume contest where everyone casually writes down their favorite ones from the night and we tally them up and hand out home-made trophies. This year’s:

We really just like people to come in costume, eat their hearts out, chat and socialize and, of course, let’s snap your picture for the record!  It’s fun! It’s a memory! We’ve had a “photo booth” of sorts every year and I don’t see it ending any time soon. Chris’s brother always provided his legit lights for the photos, but now that they’ve moved to Florida and we’ve moved to Idaho we had to fend for ourselves.  We were happy to find a perfect-for-our-needs lighting set on Amazon for $179 for four, but since we only need 2, we figured we could just sell the other 2.

As planned, we set up the photos in the front reading room.  The green walls were the perfect backdrop for about 10 creepy cloths layered haphazardly from the dollar store and tacked on with finishing nails. It created a moody, textured background for capturing all of our guests. Proof:

Those are my awesome parents, ps.  All in all, we had about 60 people show up and had a great time. Our costumes were low-key, but effective as you may have seen on Instagram (@chrislovesjulia):

We party’d on. Absolutely.  And can’t wait to do it again next year.  Anyone else hit up any parties over the weekend?  We love to hear about other cool parties and ideas that we could implement in the future!