Kid’s Party Theme Ideas
July 13th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Mon 13 Jul 2009
Planning out a children’s party can be a daunting undertaking to say the least. How to keep a group of highly energetic children entertained for a few hours is no easy task, and taking on that responsibility as the birthday child’s parent can make for a stress-filled day. However with the right approach and some unique ideas anyone can turn their child’s special day into one they remember for years to come.
Ensuring that the guests for your child’s birthday party arrive in a state of great excitement and anticipation for a fun-filled day ahead, is the first step to planning a successful party. One increasing popular idea to guarantee a day filled with joy and entertainment is to have a themed party, that includes dressing up and themed-based entertainment. The following list contains a few theme ideas that could be used at your child’s next birthday party.
Fairy - For your little girls next party take her on an enchanting journey into the land of fairy magic, where all her dreams come true!. There is no better way to liven up a girls party then to have a fairy theme, that includes fairy games, song and dance and the chance for the girls to make fairy wands and dust.
Mermaid - Have a fun-filled day swimming in the mystic sea surrounded by mermaids and dolphins! Take the theme to the next level by providing big shells to the children to colour while providing coral-styled face-painting.
Pirate - For a boy’s party there is no looking past a pirate party as a guaranteed way of providing hours of fun for the boys. If it’s a party for both girls and boys, then a pirate and mermaid theme is the perfect choice, to cater for both genders. Liven up the theme by giving the boys eye patches, cardboard-cut-out swords and black cardboard hats, or better yet, allow the boys to make the pirate items themselves to keep them entertained for a while.
Prince and Princess - If you want your little boy or girl to be that much more special on their birthday, then have a prince or princess theme, where his or her dreams of being the charming prince or beautiful fairy-tale princess will come true!
Barbie - This is yet again another all-time favourite theme for a girl’s party. Giving them the chance to become their favourite doll for the day is a sure winner of an idea!
Therefore with some careful thought, a little imagination and some well-thought-out planning you can turn your child’s birthday into a day to remember! Of course there is still the concern of organising the activities that would keep the children busy throughout the day, however this problem can be taken care of by hiring a children’s party entertainer to entertain and look after the children for the day.
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Halloween And Ground Zero
July 11th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Sat 11 Jul 2009
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, all Americans realized that everyone must unite against any and all terrorist threats. Globalization had preoccupied the consciousness of the American people. This was until 9/11 happened. People realized that they mustn’t forget their country.
Halloween reconsidered
Did you know that even Halloween was reconsidered in the context of the events that took place on 9/11? When the world recoiled at the violence and carnage that took place on that day, people thought that celebrations should necessarily reflect the losses that took place during that sad day.
A lot of individuals felt that Halloween should be a time for reflection, a time when we can truly reflect and mourn the loss of our dearly departed. This idea is the very opposite of the trend that was happening due to the commercialization of Halloween.
What was it like, back then?
If we are to believe what the scholars of Halloween are saying, then Halloween was never about candy and other frivolous commodities. It was about genuine human emotion, something that is being confused for other things in our post-modern days.
Originally, Halloween celebrated life. It was the season of looking back and remembering the people who have gone ahead of us. By looking and learning from the past, people would be better able to face the future.
The Future
Continuity is such a strong thematic for Halloween, even if people don’t realize it. Continuity is important because the thematic of death is not a terminal point; what precedes death is also the continuation of the process.
We can only fully appreciate life and creation once we have fully appreciated death. Life is coexisting with everything harmoniously. If we lived solitary lives, mementos, monuments and tombs wouldn’t have any meaning. The permanence and essence of life is commemorated by appreciating the inevitable. This realization makes our existence much more meaningful and rewarding.
Dia de los Muertos
It may sound strange to some when they hear of a festival of mourning, but the idea that death should be taught and remembered is very strong among cultures outside the United States.
In Rio Grande, the Dia de los Muertos was an official time of mourning. It was a time when people were actually interested in revisiting the memories of those what were no longer there with them. It is interesting to note, because when something unbelievably horrible or tragic happens, we often look inward and outward for answers.
In the case of the tragic events of September 11, some Americans have looked outward for answers. Because it seems that Corporate America had forgotten how to completely mourn something so tragic.
Will Halloween ever be known as something more than just a superficial celebration? Will it ever enjoy the deeper and richer meaning it used to have before getting turned into a largely commercial event?
It’s possible to change Halloween into something more profound, even if it will take some time. But when the day comes, we can finally enjoy Halloween the way it was truly meant to be enjoyed.
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Halloween And Religion
July 10th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Fri 10 Jul 2009
Halloween has suffered from more persecution than other public celebrations in the United States. Normally, the persecution comes from the religious communities in the different states. The focus is often the so-called ’satanic’ overtones of the celebration.
Why The Bad Rap?
Nowadays, the word ’satanic’ has become ambiguous in churchly domains. If the Western Christian belief was summarized, then the devil’s picture would appear to be anything that did not look Christian.
Imagine looking at a vast horizon from within a small room. Because you don’t understand the outside world, the vast horizon is dangerous. The whole horizon is the devil. This may be confirmed by studying the evolution of the image of the devil through the centuries.
Complete removal?
For many decades, the religious sector had wanted to totally erase Halloween celebrations from schools. They used the “pagan” themes as justification to eliminate Halloween from the calendar. The hideous image of goblins and ghouls were thought to be from hell.
Logically, if you’re working with this theoretical framework, then children who wear masks and costumes are being subsumed by the forces of Evil. It’s absurd, but these religious communities have a sizeable following.
Reaction
Despite the accusations, there were groups of people who did not sympathize with the fanatical religious beliefs. Based on the Atlanta Constitution, a newspaper:
“Halloween may have begun as a pagan festival, but in the United States it was now a festival of fun, feasts, fancy frocks, and frivolous fright. Ours is not just a Christian nation, but a nation born from the search of religious freedom. Let the kids have some fun.”
Because of such strong, critical views of Halloween, the celebration has been saved from unjust persecution and complete immolation.
Dousing the fire
Since all efforts have failed, the religious communities have taken other measures to make sure that they have their say as to how the Halloween festivities are to be carried out. These communities are purely reactionary, meaning; they don’t have a clear program.
These communities based their actions on irrelevant contexts without looking into more significant grounds. As a result, their attempt to control the matter was botched. But then, these reactionaries countered the Halloween festival by celebrating it in total contrast to prevailing customs.
For instance, adults dress their kids with clothes that exude vibrancy instead of ones that suggest darkness or despondency, and these pious adults may revise the standard haunted house with their own innovations.
For example, the Trinity Christian School in Texas has been known to organize a yearly Hell House. The Hell House antagonizes the frequent motifs and themes in popular culture such as the following:
- Drug-ridden raves
- Premarital sex
- Homosexuality
- Family violence
- School shootings
Its purpose is to steer the children and disoriented adolescents to their idea of the way to virtue and morality. Does it work? At some point it shows that it indeed works. Based on figures, of the 75,000 people who received police records at a certain time, around 15,000 have rejoined as responsible members of the community.
This is one of the most prominent weapons of evangelism today - aside from the Internet.
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Halloween’s Celtic Samhain Beginnings
July 10th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Fri 10 Jul 2009
Most people may think Halloween began as a pagan ritual, but it’s actually not. According to Western historians, it’s actually an abbreviated version of All Hallow Even, or the eve of All Saint’s Day. This Christian holiday takes place on November 1st, which puts Halloween on October 31st.
What’s your Halloween like?
In many regions of the world, Halloween was the time for people to remember the souls in Purgatory. The souls in Purgatory were the souls in limbo; those who are awaiting final judgment by performing acts of cleansing.
In the books of the famous Dante Alighieri, souls in Purgatorio are neither in Inferno nor Paradiso, which is consistent with the accepted notion of Purgatory. Modern interpretation of these books put All Hallow Even as the day before All Soul’s Day (which is on November 2nd).
Samhain
Experts say that Halloween started as a Roman celebration in Pomona, associated with the Roman goddess of harvest. Another version of this is a Roman celebration called Parentilia, which might explain how Halloween is celebrated. Basically, this event is a celebration for the dead.
Scholars point out that the Celtic origin of Halloween comes from the Samhain or Samuin (sow-an), which takes place after the summer days have ended. This celebration is often coordinated with the feast of Beltane. This feast celebrates the powers of life.
As you can already see, even the Celtic cultural tradition builds upon binaries, like Chinese medicine or Indian Ayurvedic tradition. There must be balance, so both the forces of death and life have to be in balance. Where there is balance of life and death energies, there is life. With imbalance, there is disease and famine.
Why the Samhain?
The Samhain was actually an acknowledgement of the two opposing forces of life and death. Summer was usually the season when people tilled the Earth, planting and harvesting food. But when winter came along, man gave way to the powers of Nature, and submitted to the ice, wind, and cold.
Halloween’s Bad Reputation
During the past several decades, Halloween went through a period of bad reputation. Owing to the fact that it’s not 100% Christian, parents and school officials wanted it banned from all school activity.
Even if it isn’t likely that the Celts really did worship the fallen Christian angel Lucifer, it changes little — Samhain rituals are just plain strange in this day and age.
Records & strange, modern depictions
In movies like those that feature the character Michael Myers (the Halloween series of movies), the Samhain was used as a central category that encompassed how a person can sacrifice to oppose the forces of life and death. The ritualistic ceremonies that the main character espoused built an image of the Samhain that stank of ‘evil’ in the most modern (yet ironically, comic) sense.
It’s ironic that there are actually very few records about how Druids really did carry out their rituals. Only Pliny the Elder provided a good look into the rituals, but even his writings didn’t contain any records of humans being sacrificed on pointed sticks. Instead, the Druids used two white bulls — a rather ordinary offering for fertility.
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Evolution of Halloween Stories in Radio, Comics, and Movies
July 8th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Wed 8 Jul 2009
Unbelievably, Halloween-inspired scripts and stories first made their appearance not in movie theaters but in good, old radio. We owe the first scary and thrilling story for Halloween to the novelist H.G. Wells. If you remember Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds, then you might already know of this novelist.
But how did a literary piece such as “War of the Worlds” scare people, especially when it’s been in circulation for a time back then? A radio production by Orson Welles turned the novel into a radio script that would serve as the first Halloween show.
“And in the news today Aliens!”
Yep, that’s true. Welles is commemorated in Hollywood thriller, horror and comedy movies rolled into one. Parts from the famous novel “War of the Worlds” were exploited as news headlines that can be read between songs on the radio.
Imagine hearing something as macabre as War of the Worlds as real news on an ordinary day, just before Halloween! The premise was perfect. Again, you guessed it right. People were actually scared! There was news that people actually panicked (North American listeners).
The radio production of this classic literary piece from the 1930s was brilliant. How it was also accepted by the people was also superb. In fact, residents in New Jersey were subjected to public panic. After the big success of “War of the Worlds,” the media became more sensible and careful in using Halloween for different productions.
Literature
The thematic of Halloween was also able to penetrate the realm of literature. Just fifteen years after the spooky radio production, a writer by the name of Anthony Boucher came up with a noir story that played with reality and the macabre. The setting of Boucher’s story was in California.
The North American comic series ‘Shock’ was published five years later. It made the perception of Halloween more frightening than it used to be. The story line was about the cruel head of an orphanage, punished and turned into a Halloween pumpkin. In addition, during Halloween, pumpkins are finely carved and hollowed, and some of its peel were also taken off.It was a daring step, but the public took the idea well, making Halloween a production where a certain handful of themes was supported.
EC Comics was also not far behind, this time focusing on things like cutting off parts of the body. However, before the sixties, the American Comics Code regulated the use of such literary devices. It was no longer ‘acceptable’ and so the short while that the Code was really active, these comic books died down.
But today, Halloween-inspired comic series are still very successful, even without the endorsement of the ACC. The ACC only rewards more wholesome comic books, such as “Archie.”
Halloween on TV and the Movies
On the other hand, the television industry was a little late in embracing Halloween themes. It was difficult to produce visual materials of macabre themes because of censorship.
Movies, on the other hand, fared slightly better. These were some of the more popular Halloween shows and movies made:
- Whispering Ghosts (Milton Berle)
- Footlight Serenade (Betty Grable & Victor Mature)
- Frankenstein (Boris Karloff)
- The House on the Haunted Hill (Vincent Price)
- Rosemary’s Baby (Audrey Hepburn)
- Night of the Living Dead (George Romero)
- King Kong
- Godzilla
- Psycho (Hitchcock)
- Night of the Demons
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Halloween and 9/11
July 8th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed
Wed 8 Jul 2009
After America was shocked by the September 11 attacks, its people reacted by uniting against foreign threats. Back then, the nation was getting lost in the globalization mix, but resurfaced into world view after the events of September 11.
Halloween reconsidered
Did you know that even Halloween was reconsidered in the context of the events that took place on 9/11? When the world recoiled at the violence and carnage that took place on that day, people thought that celebrations should necessarily reflect the losses that took place during that sad day.
Soon people treated Halloween in much the same way as Christians celebrated the day that closely followed it — All Souls’ Day. People began to reflect on life and remember their departed loved ones, a swift 180-degree turn from the corporatist image that Halloween had been getting.
The Past
If we are to believe what the scholars of Halloween are saying, then Halloween was never about candy and other frivolous commodities. It was about genuine human emotion, something that is being confused for other things in our post-modern days.
Originally, Halloween celebrated life. It was the season of looking back and remembering the people who have gone ahead of us. By looking and learning from the past, people would be better able to face the future.
Continuity
The future is an important theme for Halloween, even if not many people are aware of it. There’s the important idea that death isn’t the end of things — it’s only one point in a never-ending process.
When someone appreciates what death is, that someone would also appreciate the process of life-creation. Life is never unitary. If it were, there would be no need for monuments and tombs. The continuity of life is celebrated by remembering what happens after it. It makes the experience of living richer and more rewarding for those who are intuitive enough to realize it.
Dia de los Muertos
A festival of mourning might sound paradoxical. However, in many cultures outside the white, homogenous borders of the United States, death was something that should be taught and remembered through ritual and ceremony.
In Rio Grande, the Dia de los Muertos was an official time of mourning. It was a time when people were actually interested in revisiting the memories of those what were no longer there with them. It is interesting to note, because when something unbelievably horrible or tragic happens, we often look inward and outward for answers.
In the case of the tragic events of September 11, some Americans have looked outward for answers. Because it seems that Corporate America had forgotten how to completely mourn something so tragic.
Will Halloween ever be known as something more than just a superficial celebration? Will it ever enjoy the deeper and richer meaning it used to have before getting turned into a largely commercial event?
Hope isn’t lost. The commercialization of Halloween is only a side effect of globalization. In time, people will realize and understand its true meaning. When that time comes, they will realize and embrace the idea and emotions that started this celebration ages ago.
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