A Halloween Circus

Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls...Welcome, to the Miller Family Halloween Circus!

Get your Tickets here!

Our ticket taker is rather grim...

Incredible and Delicious Refreshments!

Music and Laughter!

A Daring Sabre Dance!

The Amazing Floating Lady!

The Incredible Talking, Singing Head of the Wizard Schmockoff!

The Horrible Harpy!

The Tall Man!

Every year for the past 5 year our family has thrown a big Halloween party. We actually did a big party the first year we moved here too. It was a harvest themed party and we invited all our new neighbors. We had been told that it had been a tradition in the neighborhood to have a harvest party on Halloween so we thought it would be fun to host it. It was fun, and a great way to gather with new friends. But the following two years, we were so overwhelmed with remodeling our home and then recovering from that, I just couldn't do a big party. Another neighbor did one...but we were busy and didn't attend. Finally, we decided it was time to bring it back. We set a theme - based on the Keats poem "La Belle Dame Sans Merci", made a Haunted Forest amongst our fruit trees, cooked tons of good food, and invited everyone we knew. It was greatly successful and so much fun! We decided that it would become a tradition, and have stuck to it ever since.

Our Halloween party theme this year was inspired by the circus in the movie Mirrormask, with a little bit of Mommy Fortuna's Travelling Carnival from The Last Unicorn thrown in. We began planning it several months ago, and I think it all came together to be our most magical party yet. We scoured vintage clothing stores and thrift stores for the bits and pieces of costumes and decorations, made plaster masks and sewed stripey tablecloths, re-purposed tacky Halloween decorations into awesome sideshow characters, and hung tons of paper lanterns and colored lights. There were only two things we fell short on - although we had our little white pony all brushed out and glittered, she never got her unicorn horn and never made it out to the main circus area, and....the harpy was supposed to have water balloon er...chests...and we just didn't get to it. She was nice and squalky though, and was quite entertaining until she felt she had enough attention and turned and pouted in her corner for the rest of the night.

We had beautiful weather, and it was a truly lovely evening for all of us. It is such a joy to share with our family and friends this way every year.