Halloween Birthday Party Theme

A unique halloween birthday party theme is to throw a Spooktacular Halloween Carnival! Candace from Arkansas shares her ideas for this fun theme.

It's a Halloween Carnival!

Shared by Candace from Little Rock, Arkansas

For my son's 8th birthday party we did a Halloween birthday party theme as his birthday is in mid-October. We decided to make it a Halloween carnival with tons of fun games and activities.

We created our own invitations using a word processing program and some "scary" clip-art. In the invitation all guests were invited to wear costumes if they wanted.

For the carnival part of the party we created game stations around our living room. All of the games were handmade using odds and ends from around the house.

I enlisted the help of my parents and husband to man the stations and purchased prizes from a dollar store for the winners.

Halloween Birthday Party Game : Pin the Wart on the Witch

I hand sketched a large witch on a piece of paper and my son colored it in for a Pin the Wart on the Witch game.

The children had paper warts with tape on the back to try and get as close as possible to the witch's pointy nose.

Halloween Birthday Games : Catch the Ghosts

I created a ring toss game called Catch the Ghosts. I did this by printing large Halloween themed ghost designs on my computer and wrapping them around 5 empty pringle cans weighted down with rocks.

With a black marker the tops each had a point value and the guests tossed glow in the dark necklaces (which I called ghost catchers) to ring the cans.

Halloween Party Game : Give the Jack-O-Lantern a Candle

Using a large cardboard box with the bottom removed and one side cut in half I created a bean bag toss.

I covered the box with plain white paper and drew a large jack-o-lanern on it. The eyes, nose, and mouth were the openings for the bean bags. I created bean bags by using some leftover white fleece remnants and dried beans. Simply cut out a rectangle, fold in half, and sew around two of the sides, add the beans, and sew up the opening.

Spooky Miniature Golf

The most time consuming game we created was a miniture golf course. We created openings in several shoe boxes and covered them with purchased wall decoration in various shapes.

One box was covered with a bat and the openings were under the two wings, one was a haunted house and the opening was the door, and one was a frankenstein with the mouth as the opening.

We borrowed the plastic golf club and balls from my younger sons golf set.

Haunted Pumpkin Hot Potato Game

Our final game was a hot potato style game using a small blow up pumpkin and a CD of kid's Halloween music. The kids would pass the pumpkin around the circle when the music started and whoever was holding the pumpkin when the music stopped was out.

Catch the Vampire Bat Halloween Birthday Party Game

Another very cute decoration/activity was a bat pinata that we created. To create this you need pinata paste (lots of recipes online), newspaper, tape, yarn, crepe paper, and cardboard.

Blow up the balloon to a nice size and cover with one layer of newspaper dipped in the paste. When this dries wrap yarn around the entire width of the balloon and tie at the top.

Use enough yarn to create a loop to hang the pinata with. Cover this with two more layers of newpaper dipped in paste (allow to dry between layers). When this is dry pop the balloon and remove.

I added candy at this time so that I could cut an opening and patch it with tape. I also cut wings for the bat out of lightweight cardboard and attached with tape. The final step was to cover the bat and the wings with strips of black crepe paper attatched with plain white glue.

I added a mouth and eyes made out of construction paper. It was the hit of the party.

Scary Food

I kept the food very simple. Black punch created by mixing grape and lime Kool-aid.

We also had spooky cupcakes. I made cupcakes and frosted them. I topped the plain frosted cupcakes with plastic monster rings, skeleton rings, and spider rings.

Decorations

For additonal decorations I purchased fake spider webs, large Halloween paper decorations, and a cemetary gate scene from the dollar store.

The games also doubled as decorations as they were aournd the room and matched the theme. The carnival angle was a great Halloween birthday party theme and all the kids had a blast!