Happy Halloween, Pos readers! We know the spookiest time of the year won’t be the same with the global pandemic around, but in our October/November issue, we published this article with some fun ideas you might fancy trying to bringing Halloween inside this year. If you enjoy it, please consider subscribing to PosAbility Magazine!
We can’t take to the streets for some trick or treating this year, but never fear: Halloween can never be cancelled. We wouldn’t allow it.
For a heartbreaking six months, the goths, costume fanatics, and lovers of the macabre amongst us have had to come to terms with one single, tragic fact: in the year 2020, Halloween will have to exist only in our dark hearts. From the Bauhaus fanatic who dresses as Siouxsie Sioux six days out of seven each week (resting only on a Sunday to let their skin breathe outside of constant heavy foundation use), to the parent quickly wrapping their child in toilet roll in the face of a school costume day panic; we know and understand that this year, Halloween will be an inside sport. Halloween is fun for little and big kids: some people engage in spiritual or cultural practices, and some just love getting dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster and collecting as much chocolate as they can get their hands on. With the looming presence of coronavirus around the world, and the presence of a second wave rearing its ugly head in the UK, this will be a year of trying to translate our outdoor Halloween activities into fun indoor ones.
If you’re looking for some fun ideas that can be done from the comfort of your own spooky home this year, fear not: the Halloween fanatics at PosAbility have been dreaming up ideas for our very own Halloween Spooktaculars that will have you doing the dance macabre from dusk ’til the witching hour.
(Witch)crafts
Can we truly deem a Halloween “spooktacular” if it does not have powerfully spooky decorations? In our humble opinion: if you don’t have at least three bats, ravens or cobwebs around your house on October 31st, you are not truly doing Halloween. Decorating your home for one single day sounds expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s a wonderful time to get little spooks and spectres in to make some excellent decorations for your home. Orange and black paper chains are a classic, as are pompom spiders. Remember making paper snowflakes at school? Paper cobwebs are the future. If you have any spare tissue paper just lying around – and let’s face it, who doesn’t – you can make some very cute tissue paper ghosts by crumpling one sheet into a ball, wrapping a sheet over the top of it, and fastening it with an elastic band. Draw on some spooky facial features and hey presto – you have your very own Casper the Friendly Ghost! If these ideas are piquing your interest, head to Pinterest, type the word “Halloween,” and get ready to blow your wages on an order of craft supplies from Hobbycraft.
Carve Out a Niche
Pumpkin carving is as American as apple pie, but the origins of the jack-o’-lantern are a lot closer to home than we know. The tradition was thought to have begun in parts of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands, were turnips were hollowed out and carved with strange faces as a means to ward off spirits who would mean them harm, as Halloween was said to be the day where the aos sí or daoine sìth – the spirits and fairies of the land – could most easily cross from the Otherworld and into ours. We’d recommend you carve a pumpkin, though, because they’re larger (and therefore easier to carve), and you can make the innards into pumpkin pie afterwards.
Bake the Dead
For some, a Halloween treat is a mini Mars bar and a handful of monkey nuts. For others, it’s a luminous orange Halloween-themed cake from Greggs, topped off with a ring in the shape of a ghost that you can surreptitiously lick for hours afterwards. Both are very iconic spooky moments. With the lack of trick or treating, however, monkey nuts may be thin on the ground, and a trip to Greggs might be out of the question. At the beginning of the lockdown, everyone decided this was their chance to refine their baking skills: it is time to reawaken those feelings. Get the oven pre-heated and decide whether this will be the year of the witch cupcake, the pumpkin cake pop, or the blood-filled raspberry jam doughnut. One of the most fun things you can do with children is teach them how to make spiderweb cakes, which sounds very difficult, but is actually just messy fun. If you bake and ice a standard cake (we like a chocolate cake here in the Pos office, but it’s your choice) or some cupcakes, you can then melt down some white marshmallows in the microwave.
Wait until they’re lukewarm, then get your spectral assistants to press their fingers together and dip them in the marshmallow. When they take their fingers out and pull them apart, they’ll have spider webs that they can pull taught over the cake!
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