The 7th Annual Halloweentown Party

We did it again!  Another Halloweentown party come and gone.  To give you an idea of my sentiments towards this annual event I should tell you that on the morning of the party I sent an e-mail to everyone that began, "When you woke up this morning did you say to yourself, 'It's the best day of the year!' If not, you should have because today is Halloweentown Party Day!" 

I feel like this one was another great success, though I had less time to set up for it.  Since I had work in the morning, and we started the party a bit earlier than usual to try accommodate for a double feature, we didn't have: pumpkin decorations, gingerbread haunted house. We did have: black and orange table runner, homemade caramel corn, chips and salsa, warm apple cider (and a little whisky for optional spiking), too much candy for words, cookies, cupcakes, pizza, salad, and a whole lot of fun!

The movie was...well, the same as always.  Same cheesy jokes.  Same gratuitous reaction shots.  But, oh, it's just wonderful!  I love sharing this movie with people year after year.  And the thing is, for return Halloweentown party guests, the movie starts to grow on them.  Yes, we all admit that it's not good cinema.  But it's endearing, and treating it just a little bit like Mystery Science Theater 3000 only makes it greater.  The more (slightly snarky, slightly sentimental) people watching at a time the better.  And this year we got in Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge.  I had never actually watched this film before (at least not that I remember) despite the fact that it's included on the Halloweentown DVD.  We decided that the film felt Beckett-esque.  Yes, Samuel Beckett-esque.  I readily admit that our attention span was a little frayed by the time we got to the second film so I might have missed a few key plot points, but they seemed to end up in a weird limbo world where everyone turned gray and started caring about finding missing socks.  Then they briefly worried that they were trapped in the gray land for a year, left to wait out the time doing nothing.  Has any other Disney Channel Original Film more closely approximated elements of Endgame and Waiting for Godot? Meanwhile, in another part of the universe, a group of people turned into their Halloween costumes (a trope we realized can be found in film/television from The Twilight Zone to Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

But all great evenings must come to an end, and so did the 7th Annual Halloweentown party.  Thanks for another fantastic year, everyone!  I leave you with this...enjoy!