Parties are possible again in the library, but since Halloween falls on a Sunday this year, we can't hold our event on that date. We are closed. Therefore, we held our party a day early.
Promotion included local Facebook groups, handouts at the front desk, posters on the door, and a lot of word of mouth. It was all much more effective than I had anticipated, and we wound up with about 50% more than I expected. This meant I spent the entire party herding chickens and jumping from task to task.
COVID restrictions meant pre-packaged snacks and drinks only. No deli trays and no punch bowl. Oh, well. Our district programming manager ordered lots of goodies. We were well prepared despite the crowd, and we didn't run out of anything.
Ms. M. had games, crafts, and storytime activities for the kids. I also took a lot of photos in a photo booth we made using a cheap green screen kit. The kids loved that. Canva was able to remove backgrounds for most pictures, and I printed a lot of custom background souvenir photos then and there, but I will need some clever workarounds in GIMP for others later on.
We tried to have a vote by applause for kids costume, but everyone clapped for everyone, so we quickly switched to holding a drawing instead. A little Disney princess won.
Image credit
I learned a few things:
A muppet costume is not even a guarantee kids won't be freaked out. It's also nigh impossible to actually work while wearing one. Bad idea.
The Eye of Argon reading challenge requires more adults with the right mindset from the start to work. Bad idea.
Balloons are great decorations. Inflating and tying dozens of them is a lot of work. Bringing an air mattress hand pump with adapters was a very good idea.
I am now exhausted after a very long day with far too much peopling and way more multitasking and distractions/interruptions than I like. I think I may even be too wrung out to even find stock photos to illustrate this post. Share your own Halloween party and costume photos below for a 100% upvote and I'll add them here with a link to your profile!
OK, I added a stock image from Pixabay as a placeholder. You're still welcome to offer something better!