Addams Family Party -13yr- Lurch Bingo

My twin daughters decided on an Addams Family (the original TV show) party for their 13th BD and we had a great time coming up with ideas that were kooky without being gory or scary. 

INVITATIONS:  A photo of Cousin Itt on the front saying, Zwfft!  We also made up other Itt-sounding words for the who-what-where info inside the card, but the actual info of date, time, and location was written in regular English.  Also inside the card was an Addams Family photo and written underneath:  Please wear black, white and/or grey to the party in honor of the classic TV show. 

DECOR:  On our front door, I posted a sign that read, Beware of the Thing.  Courtesy of a friend who works at Fish & Game, we were able to borrow a taxidermied hawk holding an oriole kill, small stuffed sea turtle and marine toad, and a handbag made from a monitor lizard complete with head and arms.  Most of the items were made from endangered species and had been confiscated at U.S. borders.  These were strategically placed around the dining room (I always try to contain the mayhem of parties in the dining room and outside  gives more of an impact with the decorations and makes cleaning-up much easier afterwards). 

A few years ago I made an almost-life-size mummy as a prop for a Girl Scout event, so I hauled it out and put the mummy up in the corner of the dining room.  At the Dollar Tree, I found some of those little creatures that grow when you put them in water - sting rays in this case - and put them in a big punch bowl a couple of days before.  They looked very creepy as they got bigger and even some of the adults were scared of them.  My daughter got out her old train set and did a train wreck tableau on the black-satin-draped dining room table reminiscent of Gomez's love of blowing up railways.  I took some old silk flowers, popped off the flower heads, and put the stems into a vase which also went on the table. 

I made a cover for an old book we had, and titled it Forever Fester:  The Enlightening Story of an Electric Personality with a photo of Fester with a light bulb in his mouth underneath the title.  We completed the look with various light bulbs strewn around the table.  (All of the photos came from http://www.addamsfamily.com/index.html and http://www.geocities.com/~cousin_itt/cpics.htm.)  I printed more weird pictures from the internet and put them in black frames to hang on the walls.  We told the guests that the strangers pictured were our relatives! 

FOOD:  Black paper plates, napkins, and plastic ware from Dollar Tree.  I glued wiggly eyes onto the fork handles.  The rest of the serving pieces were crystal and my other nice items, because Morticia did have a lot of very ornate things.  We served chunky salsa, which already looked peculiar but which I embellished" with green pimento-stuffed olives (eye of newt!).  Along with blue tortilla chips it looked suitably gross.  We also had gummy frogs and lizards eyeball gum balls green-tinted lemonade (with an eyeball floating in the pitcher) and the cake of course. 

THE CAKE:  The black-frosted cake was seven square layers topped with a hand (from our Halloween stuff) holding a little printed sign that read "Happy 13th Birthday" with a "hinged" lid above the hand (the lid was another layer of frosted cake frozen so it would stand up better).  We stuck black and white candles in horizontally around the sides of the cake with the added feature that when the candles were lighted they almost set fire to the sign - LOL! 

GAMES AND CRAFTS:  As each guest showed up they choose a name tag at random onto which I had already written various Addams Family names such as Cousin Slurp Aunt Fetish Grandma Blemish etc.  They were also given three mini stickyhands (the kind that get slapped onto things and stick there  Oriental Trading).  The guests were told that throughout the party they must call each other by the names on their tags.  If they accidentally called someone by their real name they would forfeit one of their sticky hands to the person who caught them doing it.  At the end of the party the person with the most sticky hands would win a special prize.  We played LURCH bingo; painted tiny flower pots and guests planted "Cleopatra" cuttings from my various plants into them; and made yarn bugs" to resemble Cousin Itt (I even made little black bowler hats by cutting rubber balls in half spray painting them black then gluing to rounds of black fun foam). 

PRIZES:  I usually go wacky with our prizes not the traditional stuff.  So for the Addams Family party the prizes were small tubes of hand cream (for Thing) liquid skin (because it sounded so deliciously weird!) and light bulb-looking plastic thingees filled with small erasers (Uncle Fester of course). 

FAVORS:  I took more Addams Family photos tore them around the edges and glued them to small black bags for use as treat bags.  We made gak (some people call it slime  it's just the old corn starch and water mixture) food-colored it in different weird shades and put a little of the mixtures into tiny plastic containers I got at our local Mexican fast food place (they are normally used for salsa).  These went into the treat bags along with large gummy eyeballs.  Each guest got a colorful derby hat (from Oriental Trading) in honor of Cousin Itt's hat and got to take home their sticky hands also.  The guests made quite a haul with those and their prizes painted pots and plants Cousin Itt yarn bugs and pinata goodies. 

PINATA:  The skull pinata from Oriental Trading was a substitute because I ran out of time to make a Cousin Itt pinata (which was to be a cone shaped paper mache creation covered with hair from old thrift-store wigs).  It was filled with more eyeball candy black lollipops and other strange candy. 

THANK YOU CARDS:  The thank you card will have a photo of Thing on the front with the caption Thank you Thing.  On the inside it will read And thank YOU too!  My DDs will write a personal thanks inside and I will enclose a party photo of the guest into each card. 

MISCELLANEOUS:  Although we usually ban TV during our parties we made an exception this year to continuously show our Addams Family TV show DVDs.  A few of the guests were not familiar with the classic show so this helped to familiarize them to some of the stuff that was going on at the party.  As guests came and went outside they were able to stop for a moment to watch a scene or two of the TV show in the family room."