Five Alternative Themes for Parties at Halloween

Traditional Halloween parties seem to all go the same way. There’s bobbing for apples, drinking cider, jack-o-lanterns adorning every table and lots and lots of orange and black. Been there, done that. Try something different this year for your Halloween celebration and have an alternative Halloween party your guests will be talking about for years to come!

Celebrity Party
Whether it’s Lady Gaga or Michael Jordan, everyone has a favorite celebrity they would love to be if even just for a day. Help your guest’s dreams come true by having a celebrity-themed Halloween party! Roll out the red carpet for your guests as they arrive, and be sure to take lots of pictures in true paparazzi style. Have elegant hours devours prepared, popular music and be sure to give away Hollywood awards for the best celebrity look-alikes. This theme can be done with adults and/or children and is especially good for the party host who wants to steer clear of anything scary for their Halloween party.

Vampire Party
There’s no doubt that vampires have reached insane levels of popularity over the past couple of years, and Halloween is the perfect time to throw a vampire party- no humans allowed! Make sure your guests grab their white vampire fangs and prepare for a night of fun with fellow vampires. Set the mood with organ music or have your favorite vampire movie playing. Send your guests home with candies covered in Halloween favor wrappers they won’t find anywhere else! Depending on how much you get into the vampire and blood theme, this party is still probably best for adults only.

Halloween Hoedown
Not everyone is into the spook and gore of Halloween, so why not throw a non-threatening Halloween Hoedown? Greet your cowboy-hat and boot-wearing guests at a barn entrance  and direct them to the fun inside. Play your favorite country music and leave plenty of room for line dancing. Guests old and young will get a kick out of glass boot mugs they can take home to remember the party throughout the year. This non-threatening Halloween theme will leave your guests feeling light-hearted instead of spooked out.

Decade Party
Hulahoop back to the 50’s. Flashback to the 80’s. Take your Halloween guests to a decade they haven’t visited in years. The key to this party is your groovy music CD.  Play favorite songs from your chosen decade and watch your guests reminisce about old times. Have friends and family bring pictures of themselves from past decades and put them into a box as they arrive. Display the pictures and see if your guests can pick each other out from the wall of photos. Your peace sign danglers fit any retro party and leave your guests feeling like they’ve gone back in time.

Wild about Halloween
Unleash your inner animal at a safari-themed Halloween party. Guests of all ages can dress as their favorite animal, or make things really interesting by telling people what animal they have to dress up as! Decorate your venue with animal print party balloons and literally make everything – from the invitations to the giraffe print cups – in the animal print of choice. Play a game of animal charades and watch your guests fall over in laughter as they watch each other imitate wild animals.

Let your October imagination run wild with unique, Halloween theme parties!

Host a Halloween Ball – Ghoulish Ideas

Calling all ghouls, ghosts, and goblins to a grossly gruesome gathering! Royalty are not the only ones who want to go to the Ball, host a Halloween Ball. Create a creepy atmosphere with a variety of different types of Halloween party supplies to transform your home or party space into a ghastly Halloween bash.

Outdoor Halloween Décor
Start the Halloween haunting in the front yard with an assortment of outdoor Halloween decorations! Beckon the spooks with an eerie graveyard kit. Be sure to strategically place a personalized tombstone yard sign in the graveyard to declare that the guests have arrived dead on at the ghoulish get-together. Cover up front windows with plastic window scenes, window posters (Sinister Sid and Grim Reaper), and freak out your creepy guests with a motion detection haunted house 666 sign that spins the third number from a 9 to a 6, while it plays thunder and lightning sounds. Post a tattered “Enter at your own Risk” banner over the front door for an additional outdoor accent.

Indoor Halloween Décor
Put a spooky touch on every room that the Halloween Ball guests are going to haunt with fantastic Halloween party décor. In the “ball room”, deck out the ceiling with orange and black twirly whirlys, and give additional light to the room by adding a few Halloween LED lanterns. In the middle of the space, hang a spider web canopy to create a creepy chandelier look. This freaky decoration has gnarly posable legs and eyes that light up. To convert walls to match your Halloween décor, cover them with black gossamer fabric.The gothic mansion scene setter portraits are perfect for a main hallway or a large open wall. In the lavatory, give your guests a fright with the zombie hand peel’n place toilet topper. This vinyl low stick adhesive decoration looks like a zombie hand is reaching out of the toilet bowl filled with blood. You can even decorate the refrigerator with a disgusting Halloween refrigerator door cover. The cover features a freezer panel with a frozen head and assorted parts. The refrigerator panel pictures a mixture of unsavory decaying food, worms, and various specimens.

Halloween Tableware
Cover all of the tables with black gossamer and an overlay of spider web patterned gossamer. Place a haunted house glitter centerpiece in the middle of the tables, surrounded by dreary glitter leaf table sprinkles. The scary silhouettes dinner plates, napkins, and cups are a great Halloween tableware choice for your party. At the serving table, attach a bloody gauze panel to the top of the black gossamer, and then position a black tabletop Halloween tree as the centerpiece.

For a real thrill, put the meat market value pack of bloody body parts on a platter with a cover. Have guests touch the items without seeing them, and then try to guess what they are touching. Be sure to play fun music and include songs like the Monster Mash. Let your ghoulish creativity rise and be brought forth from your inner being!

Personalize Your Home & Brew

Create a signature event (almost literally!) of an Oktoberfest bash, Halloween haunting, homemade autumn brew and more with personalized products from Shindigz.com.

Personalized Fall Party Supplies
Fall events call for beautifully photographed country backdrops like our autumn photo background illustration or the Fence in the Fall backdrop from Fall Party Supplies. These gorgeous backgrounds come in six different sizes. Imagine one behind a head banquet table and for photo op possibilities. You can use them outdoors if you order vinyl versions.

Add up to three lines of text to a backdrop — or none at all! Coordinate it with personalized fall banners for advertising your autumn event, and party favors in sweet candy corn designs.

Be sure to pick up a few sets of handy banner bungee cords for securing backdrops, banners, or anything else sporting grommets.

Personalized Halloween Party Supplies
If you can give a pretty sure estimate of how many neighbors will show up on your doorstep on Halloween, why not kick up the trick-or-treat scene a notch or two? Toss personalized Halloween party favors such as candy bars or lollipops into their bags, or pick out Halloween favor boxes to customize with a neighborly Halloween greeting. You can fill the boxes with edibles and other treats such as stickers, magnets and decals.

Speaking of greetings, welcome the little goblins to your home on the big night with a Halloween yard sign or made-to-order, personalized Halloween tombstones.

Personalized Oktoberfest Party Supplies
Oktoberfest celebrations typically showcase Bavarian food and drink, so if this is true of yours, take a look at the brat-, beer- and pretzel-embellished Germanfest entrance arch. A colorful, amusing entrance for Oktoberfest guests, the arch is topped with a sign that looks like an accordion and has three lines of room for your special Oktoberfest message. Hand beer steins to arriving guests underneath the arch and snap photos of them to share on Facebook afterward.

Personalized tableware items are naturals in this setting. Personalize beverage labels, coasters, travel mugs and beer mugs – including our very popular LED mug.

Consider custom beverage and dinner napkins for Oktoberfest, too. Just select the type of imprint you want (metallic, holographic, etc.) for your custom napkins, add an order to the cart and customize by adding your wording and choosing an Oktoberfest graphic. Just remember to keep the contrast high (i.e., dark napkin with light imprint or vice-versa) for the best results.

Personalized Home Brews
We know a hobby wine maker who always bottles up a batch of a special red he calls “Witches’ Brew.” If you’re an at-home vintner, brew master or autumn bottler of Swedish glögg, come browse our bottle labels to find customizable labels for your home brews to match most any theme or occasion.

Say It with Personalized Halloween Tombstones

Brandish your rapier wit and dark humor using personalized Halloween tombstones for Halloween — and beyond!

Personalized Halloween tombstones help you make a statement indoors or out, with cardboard or weather-resistant corex. Use Create-A Tombstone to select size up to 48” tall, preferred color/texture, up to four lines of text, and a ghoulish graphic.

Personalized Tombstones for Halloween
From a layout standpoint, tombstones work as any other decorations do and that means odd numbers of them look best. Use one as a marker for your Halloween party or haunted house as a clever alternative to a yard sign, and a minimum of three tombstones for haunted cemetery and other displays.

If using more than a single tombstone, stagger the placement a little for best effect and add skull fencing, grave evaders and other outdoor Halloween décor.

“Epitaphs” come easily if the message is event information; otherwise we highly recommend typing “funny epitaphs” into your favorite search engine for inspiration (and for personal enjoyment). Many of them are real, some from a century or more past. Don’t be afraid to use epitaphs you’ve read before (“I told you I was sick”) because there is always a new generation coming along who hasn’t!

Personalized Tombstones for Milestones
If you can’t push the envelope a bit with close friends and family, when can you? Plan an Over-the-Hill theme for a party that includes personalized tombstones.

Use the first two lines of text for the person’s name and age. For a birthday party, fill the last two lines with his or her personal slogan or a comment about a pastime, preferably with a grave play on words:

Evangeline Johnson
60
Die-Hard Golfer

A retirement party might focus on profession:

Clark Billingsley, D.D.S.
Has Filled His
Last Cavity

Select a tombstone size that you can put right on the cake table, and lay a bouquet of black silk roses at the base. Use with one of our graveyard backdrops or illustrations.

Personalized Tombstones for Sports & Entertainment Themes
Next time you have a crowd over to watch sports entertainment of a tough, no-mercy type, personalize a tombstone yard sign for the opposing team:

Stick a Fork
In the Eagles
They Are
Done

At a minimum, we could see this for football, a hockey party and professional wrestling when the WWE’s Undertaker is in town. If you are really looking for an over-the-top way to express team spirit, place a longer message on a set of three personalized traditional tombstones in corex and place them Burma-Shave fashion along your street or driveway.

Find tombstones for any theme party idea in the Personalized Halloween Decorations store.