How to Make a Kick-Arse Halloween/Birthday Party

Step 1: Recruit sweet and yet, totally awesome friends to help with everything.

Halloween masks from Wally World

Step 2: Have your schmexy partner help you hang decorations because you are vertically challenged.

Step 3: Stand back and admire your decorations

Even Holly is festive!

Step 4: Buy more decorations and party supplies.

Actually this is a good point to keep track of what you are spending and what friends may be willing to contribute.  We don't have a ton of seating, so we asked our friends to bring over their folding chairs if they had any.  We recently hosted a pot luck and our friends contributed liters of soda, plates, napkins, etc.  Those will be rolled over to this party.  I picked up paper Halloween napkins ($1 at Target), straws, cupcake liners, a cupcake tower, glowstick balloons (they're really cool), and a few other decorations.  I plan on asking friends to contribute cases of beverages or snacks to assist in costs.  The day of the party, I texted friends to bring over more cups.
One thing I would recommend is maybe/maybe not having a keg.  We had one at our party and it became a free-for-all for people to come- not intentionally either.  Throughout the night, I was stressing due to the amount of people who came to an "invite-only" party...woof.

Step 5: Plan Your Food

We had light refreshments and snackage.  Basically a ton of cupcakes, chips, pretzels, all in Halloween theme.  Again, friends will assist in contributing things for s'mores or chips for the snack bowls.  Our friend Babs made this amazing pizza dip...yum yum!

Step 6: Entertainment (aka order "Hocus Pocus" from Amazon)

I totally plan on having Hocus Pocus playing in the background along with episodes of True Blood. I'm sure there will be college-themed games going about to because let's face it, I love BOOM.
We didn't actually end up playing anything on the TV, due to the amount of people already there.

Step 7: Make sure you've already passed out your invitations by this point because if you haven't...FOR SHAME.

For Brittany's party I made two types of invitations, coffins and toe tags.  Coffins went to large apartments and toe tags went to individuals.

Step 8: Costumes Required.

If people showed up without a costume, they experienced the Asian Tornado.

Holly as Yoda

My "Ms. Frizzle" (The Magic Schoolbus) Halloween Costume

Step 9: Present for the Roommate

A LLAMA! Well not a real llama, a stuffed animal one to remind her of her adventures here and that we have an Emu/Llama farm down the road.

Sketch on her envelope (of her card) because she loves Batman

Our life is awesome.