If you’re looking for Halloween party ideas for kids and adults, you’ve come to the right place! We recently hosted a Halloween party at our house and invited entire families, which meant creating a party that was just as fun for the adults as it was for the kids. From spooky food and festive cocktails to kid-friendly food and treats, Halloween decor, and plenty of room to hang out, I wanted it to feel festive without making it overly complicated to host. And because it’s me, I include recipes and directions on how I added tiny festive touches to each dish!
Halloween party food for kids and adults alike:
First, for me (and most people), the party is all about the food. You don’t want people leaving your party still starving. And since I invited families that had kids ranging from ages 10-14ish, I wanted kid-approved staples. I created my menu using a Canva template. For the main course, I made Italian sliders. Then, I ordered a medium sized platter from Chick Fil A off of their catering menu. I just placed the order for 30 minutes before the party and Vince picked them up while I set up the other food. I kept all of my food warm by using these catering-grade heat lamps! Then, I kept the main dishes simple because I went all-out with finger foods and sides!
Halloween party appetizers and sides:
For sides, I highly recommend finding a couple recipes you can make ahead of time. Anything that lightens the load of work the day of the actual party is a blessing. So, I made deviled eggs using this recipe. Then, I made pasta salad. I didn’t use a recipe. I just measured and added shit with my heart. For this specific one, I cooked a bag of pumpkin shaped noodles. Then I halved a carton of cherry tomatoes, quartered a cucumber, and added yellow bell pepper strips.
For the cheese, I took some time to melt small mozzarella balls into a skull mold to make cheese skulls! I love adding little Halloween touches to make the party feel special. The last step was to toss with some good ol’ Olive Garden brand Italian dressing! The beauty of the pasta salad is it is actually better when you make it the day beforehand and let the flavors meld together!
How to make the mozzarella skulls: I purchased one package of small mozzarella pearls. I preheated the oven to 350, and then put about 4 pearls in each mold. (The mold is four skulls.) I baked for 8 minutes at 350 and removed from the oven. While they were still hot, I added another 1-2 pearls and used a spoon to smooth it all down. And then I let them cool for about 10 minutes before popping them out to make another batch. I ended up making around 4 batches with the package of mozzarella I had. You could also use shredded mozzarella too, the pearls are just what I had on hand!
For the other sides, they were items I had to make the day of the Halloween party. One item that is always a hit at every party I host is my beer weenies. It’s my mom’s recipe and is the easiest shit you’ll ever make. Get two packages of beef kielbasa and cut into medallions that are about 1/3 inch think. Toss them in a crockpot with one bottle of chili sauce, one pound of brown sugar, and one beer. (I tend to use Coors Light). Put your crockpot on high and cook 3-4 hours. The longer they cook, the better they get in my book. Or you can put your crockpot on low and have them simmering most of the day. I just like them a little darker!
Another no-fail app at a Halloween party for kids and adults is a charcuterie board! Two years ago when I threw a party, I made fruit shish kabobs. While they were cute, they didn’t get eaten, so this year I figured the fruit could be represented on the charcuterie board. (And it saved me making another dish!) But below I added a photo of what they looked like when I made them last time in case you’re on the fruit kabob train. I used these food picks to add a festive touch.
In the photos above, the charcuterie board on the left is from this year. The photo on the right was my 2024 board with the fruit kabobs and veggie platter. To me, the charcuterie board is the easiest thing to add festive touches to. I bought a wheel of brie cheese and used a small ghost cookie cutter to cut out the middle. Then I filled it with raspberry jam. I cubed up some white cheddar and smoked gouda, tossed on a few types of crackers, made some salami roses, and added small pickles, olives, nuts, and fruit.
Goat cheese monsters: You’ll see in both pics above that there are two round balls of goat cheese with eyeballs on them. I got an 8 ounce log of goat cheese, split it half, and rolled it into two balls. Then I rolled each ball in a shallow dish of everything bagel seasoning. Then I added two candy eyeballs to them to make them look like little monsters. Once I did that, I tossed some spider rings on the charcuterie board and called it good.
For my 2026 party, I nixed the formal looking veggie platter and instead opted for a few veggies that would be sturdy dippers for my spinach artichoke dip. So just know that you don’t have to have a giant ass veggie tray that barely anyone will touch if you don’t want to!
How to arrange your Halloween Party Food:
As you can see by my photos above, I separated cold from hot foods for this party. You definitely don’t need to do that. But I’ll warn you, the food heat lamps throw off serious heat and I didn’t want them making my deviled eggs or cold veggies and ranch dip hot…because ew!
The last food I had on my hot station was this crockpot spinach artichoke dip. I made it two hours before the party and kept the crockpot on low until everyone arrived! You’ll see other little touches I throw in there like this pumpkin candy bowl that I used to hold tortilla chips. I used little ghost plates to be my spoon rests, and of course used Halloween printed paper plates and napkins. Lastly, I stashed silverware in this cute jack-o’-lantern utensil holder. It’s all about the tiny touches around here you guys!
Desserts:
You can’t have a party without some festive as fuck desserts. I made two – one was a box mix and one was from scratch – because…balance!! For the boxed mix, I got Funfetti brand spider web brownie mix. You just mix the brownie batter, then cut the tip off a marshmallow cream bag and spiral it out. Use a knife to drag outwards to make that web look. Then bake and toss a spider ring in the middle!
For the monster cookies I made from scratch, I used this recipe. I love them because they have both peanut butter chips, chocolate chips, M&M’s and pretzels so they are the perfect combo of salty and sweet, crunchy and soft.
Festive alcoholic drinks:
I love having two signature drinks at any party I host. The warm one always tends to be the same – hard cinnamon apple cider. The recipe is easy AF and can simmer in the crockpot all day long. It’s one handle of apple flavored Crown Royal, one bag of red hots, and one gallon of apple cider. Combine all in a crockpot and let simmer all day! I also make this drink every Halloween and pass out fun festive cups full of it to all my neighbors for us to enjoy drinking while we walk around trick-or-treating with our kids.
For this year’s cold drink, I literally just googled “Halloween batch cocktail recipes.” I didn’t want to have to do the math on any recipe since many tend to tell you how to make one cocktail, not 20. I chose a Blackberry Pomegranate Smash and it was delicious! Here is the recipe below – (I doubled it for my party.) I turned it into a free printable for you to make your life easy!
I also sugared the rim of these cute plastic cups with vanilla bean sugar! Then, I put it all in my favorite drink dispenser and then added the ginger ale right as people were arriving! The cocktails and bar area are my places to shine in respect to decor and little festive touches. So, this year, I froze plastic spiders in ice cubes. And then I sugared rosemary and set it out in this cute bat tray with some fresh blackberries and lime wedges! No cocktail is complete without some fixings to add to the top!
To sugar rosemary (or cranberries or anything else you want to sugar), boil one half cup of water with one half cup of sugar to make a simple syrup. Once the sugar dissolves, take the simple syrup off the stove and let it cool a few minutes. Then simply dip your accoutrement of choice in the syrup. Then dip it into a shallow bowl with sugar in it. Let you rosemary or fruit dry out on a piece of wax paper for a little bit then put in the fridge. I sugar cranberries every year for a Christmas party I host for our school’s PTO and I use this same method for the cranberries! So easy, and really adds a great touch. To add some Halloween flare, I used this coffin sign for the booze menu and had everything staged on our bar above our wine fridge!
No one ended up drinking wine, but I always set out 6 red and 6 white glasses just in case! Better to be prepared than have your guest bring some wine they want to open and you’re forced to go dust off some glasses!
Halloween Party Games for kids and adults:
Now, I need for forewarn you all how we party at the Lynn house. We don’t play games, we don’t make people dance. We tend to eat, drink, and shoot the shit while our kids run around and hang out. But, in order to make sure the kids weren’t bored, I did set up some activities and crafts in our basement!
For a craft, I bought two bags of mini pumpkins and paint pens. I figured the kids could decorate mini pumpkins but it wouldn’t require adult supervision since there would be no carving. Then, I put them on a folding table with a color-your-own Halloween tablecloth with markers for easy coloring. For a craft, I bought some Halloween keychains they could assemble on their own. The mission here is to have crafts and games the kids can maintain themselves!
Halloween games for kids:
I kept the games simple so that one of us adults wouldn’t have to run it or help with it like you would a “pin-the-head on the skeleton” game. So I got witch hat ring toss and a beanbag toss game. For my girls’ birthdays, my mom got them a karaoke machine so I set that up in the basement living room.
The irony of all this prep? I think maybe two kids painted a pumpkin. They chose to tell ghost stories in the dark and play hide-and-seek. So if you don’t want to have official games or crafts, just have a safe space for them to run around and hide or tell ghost stories in. You can even set up a fog machine (if you dare want to brave that indoors) or swap lightbulbs out for black lights! There are a million ways to make it creative for cheap and little effort!
Halloween party favors for kids and adults:
The last little touch I love for a party like this are party favors! I focused on favors for the kids, but you could easily make these adult-friendly by swapping out the small toys for shooters of liquor! Add candy and voila, a favor is born! I ordered the coffin treat boxes from Dollar Tree. They come in a pack of 24 so I’ll have favor boxes for next year too! Then, I filled them with tootsie pops, gummy eyeballs, mini sticky skeletons, Halloween pop-its, spider rings, super balls, Halloween shaped sticky hands, and pencils.
I hope these ideas were useful to you! I love throwing a party with great food and conversation. After our party was over, I got the sweetest text from my friend Lauren saying she appreciated all the tiny details of the party. It brought me such joy she noticed them! I didn’t even touch how I decorate because my house is already decorated to the gills at Halloween. So here is a blog on how I decorate for Halloween! And here is a blog about how to throw a great elementary school Halloween party. If you want to shop all of my Halloween party stuff in one spot, check out my LTK collection here. As always, thanks for reading!
