What could be better than an Evil Twin on Halloween?!

What you will need:

• 2 Plastic Pumpkin or Ghost Halloween Buckets
• Small Halloween prizes or individually wrapped candies

How to play:

• Put prizes in the buckets and set them at one end of the room or yard
• Divide your guests into 2 teams and each team seperate into pairs
• The Evil Twins are formed by having 2 players from the same team stand back-to-back and link arms with each other.
• A set of Evil Twins from each team races to the buckets and each player must retrieve a prize – without Unlinking their arms! – then race back to their team to let the next set of Twins go.
• The first team to have all players return with prizes, wins!

This is a great first game at any Halloween party – for adults or children.

Variations:

• For children – Hang spider webs for the children to walk through
• Fill a baby pool with blown up balloons for everyone to walk through – have extra balloons ready to replace the ones that may pop
• For adults – have Jello-Shots on a table instead of prizes in the bucket – they have to do a shot, without unlinking, before they can head back

The weather is turning cooler in some areas, and already the leaves have begun turning. Soon, it will be Halloween! Have you ever wondered how Halloween (also spelled Hallowe’en) came to be celebrated as we know it today? Also known as All Hallows’ Eve and All Saint’s Eve, the holiday is celebrated on October 31st worldwide. It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain (meaning “summer’s end”). In ancient days, the Celts dressed in crude costumes to celebrate Samhain. Samhain suggested the end of a harvesting period and it was also associated with human death. The ancient Celts believed that during the night of October 31st, the ghosts returned to earth to cause trouble to the human kind. So they burned animals and crops in a bonfire as a sacrifice to their gods while donning scary costumes made from animal skin and heads. Some Christians even today refuse to celebrate Halloween because of its history of pagan rites. Today, it is largely a secular celebration, with little regard to the many traditions and rituals of hundreds of years ago.

Activities on Halloween include carving pumpkins (Jack-O-Lanterns), dressing up in costume and going door to door trick-or-treating, or attending costume parties. Games like “bobbing for apples” is also popular, as is visiting “haunted houses”, playing pranks, and even sitting around a bonfire and telling scary stories.

The prevalent colors of black and orange are associated with the holiday, it is thought, because of the darkness of night and the color of fire, autumn leaves, or pumpkins. Elements of the autumn season, such as pumpkins, corn husks, and scarecrows are also popular. Homes are often decorated with these types of symbols around Halloween. Some towns have annual pumpkin carving contests and house-decorating contests. Still others hold an annual Halloween parade.

Halloween imagery includes themes of death, evil, the occult, magic, or monsters. Traditional characters include ghosts, witches, vampires, werewolves, bats, skeletons and black cats. The use of costumes comes from the belief that wearing a costume will ward off evil. Present day “characters” that can be seen running the streets on the evening of Halloween are any variety of cartoon personalities, superheroes, clowns, animals, politicians (see “cartoon personalities” and “clowns”). This year’s favorites will likely include plenty of Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Smurfs, Toy Story, Harry Potter and Vampire costumes. I often think of Halloween as the one day in the year you can dress up to be anyone or anything you want, if even just for one day, and no one will think you’ve lost your mind because everyone else is doing it too.

Retailers love Halloween – it has become one of the largest money making holidays ever. You’ll notice that the Halloween decorations and supplies appear in stores right around (if not before) Labor Day. There are plenty of uses for those Halloween props throughout the year too – at over-the-hill parties, given as gag gifts, or even in some classroom projects.

Whatever you do this Halloween, enjoy yourself, be safe, and most of all, have FUN!!!