Weekend Wrapup: A Halloween Gathering

Happy Monday everyone! I hope that all of you east coasters are staying safe from the storm today – and maybe enjoying a day (or two) off from work, perhaps?

I have to admit: Halloween is one of my all-time favorite holidays. I mean, you can’t beat Christmas for all of the hot chocolate, pretty lights, and the like, but there is something special about Halloween.

One of my biggest guilty pleasures is watching horror movies. I will watch any and every scary movie you put in front of me. I love the selection from the late 70s and early 80s – Halloween with Jamie Lee Curtis was the very first scary movie I ever watched, and it never fails – I have to watch it again every year on Halloween. You can’t go wrong with movies from around that time – Friday the 13th (hello Kevin Bacon), Nightmare on Elm Street (Johnny Depp!), and oh so many more…

As for recent scary movies, I hate to admit that I kind of love the Paranormal Activity movies – the first one actually succeeded in making me feel paranoid at night for a day or two. Why I want to watch something that makes me feel a little scared, I have no idea!

Anyway, on Saturday we had a little Halloween get together with a few others, and it was a great excuse for my mom and I to set up a slew of creepy and cute Halloween treats…just because it’s fun to get into the spirit!

I love cute little details, and we gathered most of these from places like T.J. Maxx and Home Goods (yes – the Martha Stewart line of products for about $2 a pop? You can’t resist it!). The coasters were too cute, and don’t you love the witch shoes salt and pepper shakers?

As for the food: nothing was too complicated! There were just a few easy twists for a fun presentation that was Halloween themed! Like the skeleton veggie plate, for example. We were already serving up fresh vegetables with dip, so I arranged them in the shape of a skeleton for some creepy and cute fun! It was incredibly easy to create, and fun to look at! You could make your own using different ingredients to your own taste…I was personally a fan of using bell pepper to make the ribs and a placing a piece of kale into the dip bowl for some hair (even though skeletons don’t have hair…whatever) – so cute!

We ladled up roasted tomato soup for a main course, and served it with slices of snake shaped bread, stuffed with goodies like spinach, cheese, and sausage. Again, nothing too complicated…but enough to get into the Halloween spirit!

And we couldn’t leave out dessert. We used a mold (found at Michaels) to form some white chocolate into skeleton pieces, made a chocolate brownie, crumbled some extra brownie pieces on top as “dirt,” and added the bones – easy and perfect for Halloween. Plus, a fudgy brownie never hurts, right? I couldn’t resist the call of this graveyard brownie…

So, our Halloween party was relatively low-key this year, but who knows…next year I MIGHT just have to go all out…since we’ll be living in our own house and can decorate! And yes…you read that correctly – we’re moving! I’ll be sharing more details soon…but suffice it to say that I’m a bit stressed out as I think about packing, decorating, and transferring over to a new address!

What did YOU do this weekend – did you celebrate Halloween at all? What’s your favorite Halloween movie to watch around this time of year?