Inexpensive Entertaining - Ideas for a Children's Halloween Party

Leafing through the pages of magazines like Martha Stewart Living and catalogs like Frontgate, Grandin Road or Horchows can give you the sense that Halloween entertaining must include expensive props like a fancy family of live-size mummies, oil paintings with eyes that move, or a full set of Halloween-themed dishes.  But the truth is that you can throw a party for your kids and their friends before or after trick-or-treating that uses items you already have on hand with just a few additions from the store.  Here are some ideas:
As guests arrive, keep everyone busy with a simple activity.  Perhaps have them decorate cupcakes (which they can take home as a party favor); color with crayons or markers (you can download monster-themed coloring pages here); or create a collage or decorate mini pumpkins with paint, scraps of fabric, buttons, glitter, or whatever else you have hanging around.
The main event of the party can be trick-or-treating around your neighborhood.  Or create a simple haunted house: have the kids enter a room that is completely dark except for some flickering candlelight, and have them touch an assortment of gooey items as the haunted house host tells them what they are handling: zombie intestines (cooked spaghetti); werewolf skin (a piece of real or fake fur); eyeballs (peeled grapes); severed fingers (several cooked, peeled fingerling potatoes).  Download spooky music to add to the creepy atmosphere.

We've had good success with creating a Halloween-themed scavenger hunt.  Create creepy clues that lead the kids to various spots around the house, ending with a basket or carved-out pumpkin full of goody bags for everyone.  Write the clues with the age of your audience in mind: younger kids need more explicit direction while older kids will enjoy figuring out more challenging clues.  You can also make the language (and the locations) scarier for older kids.  Rhyming clues are always popular with all age groups.
Another main event might be the screening  of a Halloween-related movie.  Good possibilities include

• It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown
• Beetlejuice
• or any Scooby-Doo movie

Of course no Halloween party is complete without plenty of goodies!  Consider these ideas:

• Make punch (any red punch will do) in a large bowl and keep it chilled with icy hands you've made by filling clean plastic gloves with water, sealing them and freezing them overnight.
• Warm up trick-or-treaters with cups of tomato soup ("bloody soup") you serve in a soup tureen you've made out of a hollowed-out pumpkin.
• A main course of Bloody (chicken) fingers or Baked eyeball casserole.
• A dessert assortment of Graveyard gravel, Witch's hats and chocolate cupcakes with worms.

To make your buffet table especially frightening (but still frugal), use severed hands to hold things -- see  these instructions to learn how to make them.