Johnsonville Club’s Halloween/Samhain celebrations are always a lot of fun, and each year seems to bring more costume creativity as people really get into the spirit of the night. Every year the club also adds a little more to its stock of Halloween decorations, and so the night builds in colour and atmosphere.

Setting the scene

At two previous Halloween celebrations, our black and white skeleton centrepiece has demonstrated a tendency to peel off the wall over the course of the night. However, this year we finally worked out how to attach and suspend it securely. Not very exciting perhaps for others, but a very exciting achievement for me!

We also found a way to display all those scary masks, and the perfect spot for that truly enormous hairy spider. Extra decorations from Elizabeth N and Allison, as well as a couple more club items meant the hall was decorated throughout, giving us the full Halloween experience.

Bringing Halloween to life

Monday night’s dance floor was full of witches, wizards, and devils in their capes, hats, and horns. There were skulls and skeletons, winged bats and lurking spiders of every shape, size, and colour, with or without cobwebs.

It seems the spiders multiply between one Halloween and the next! This year brought spider rings and necklaces, socks and hats, small spiders and large, with the (Queensland-purchased) huge, hairy ‘club spider’ finding a home high on the doorframe.

Amongst all that black-black-black, it was great to have a sprinkling of tartan and pumpkin orange to bring colour to the dance floor. Lovely also to have Harry Potter costumes adding to the mix for the first time.

Hair colouring and face-paint took it to another dimension. Green-haired, pumpkin-faced dancer Anne M, and Hilary our ghoulish musician did a fantastic make-up job, and if you didn’t know who they were, you wouldn’t have recognised them.

Musician Aileen was dressed all in black, and started the night with a witchy hat and a dangling something-or-other. However, it was such a distraction she happily discarded it part way through. She’s not having much luck, at the Johnsonville 2020 Halloween celebration at Johnsonville Bowling Club, strands of hair from Aileen’s green wig ended up stuck in her accordion!

Dancing to theme

The club has favourite Halloween dances which Rod puts on the programme every year—Slytherin’ House (with those tricky snake passes), Ferla Mor with its wonderfully atmospheric music, and Ellwyn’s Fairy Glen for the fun of those clap-clap-claps, which are so easy to forget …

Other dances appear regularly, such as Samhain Magic, The Fairy Dance, and The Scottish Werewolf (devised by club member Denise Sander in the 1970s and named by the Johnsonville children’s class for their class tutor Iain Boyd). The challenge for Rod is to find some new dances every year to bring a bit of variety.

This year Rod chose The Beltane as a new dance for us, to acknowledge that we in the Southern Hemisphere are coming out of winter into summer. (In contrast, Samhain celebrates the end of the harvest in the Northern Hemisphere.) Rounding out the programme was Devil’s Quandary, which we haven’t danced for some years.

Supper surprises

Every year the supper team go all out to bring us wonderfully imaginative Halloween-themed supper treats. We never know what we’ll get, and we look forward to seeing what’s on offer when the supper hutch opens to reveal our Halloween supper surprises.

This year Elizabeth N created amazing orange rice-bubble pumpkins held together with melted marshmallow, and a segmented rattle-snake made of cheerios encased in pastry, complete with a green snake-lolly tongue.

Being a fifth Monday, Liz Hands was on duty, baking ever so many cookies with her new set of cookie cutters in the shape of pumpkins, ghosts, skulls, witch’s hats and bats. A special non-spreading biscuit base kept them in shape, and Liz enhanced each one with coloured icing decorations.

Elizabeth kindly made sure there was something for everyone, supplementing Halloween specialties with decadent choccies and GF/DF savouries, and Anne H supplied chocolate cake. A skull cup held the teaspoons, skeleton hands defended the choccies, and little black rats and a very sweet (if bony) owl enlivened the supper bench.

Thanks

It’s always a bit of a challenge to get Khandallah Town Hall set up and decorated for theme nights, with only 20 minutes from when we can get into the hall till start time. It’s only possible due to the many volunteers who turn up early to help.

Many thanks to all those who came early to set up or stayed late to pack up, to Rod our MC for a great programme and a fun night, and to the supper team for all their creative efforts.

Special thanks to our musicians, the Cranberry Tarts (Aileen and Hilary) who really put their hearts and souls into making it such a special night for us.

One other person deserves special mention, club bard Aline Homes. This is the second year she has shared her bardic reading, entertaining us with her version of the legend of Tam O’Shanter

It was a great night for the 37 members, and past member Pat Reesby, who reliably joins us for Halloween each year. Well done one and all.

Click on the arrows below the gallery to see more happy, smiling faces of our dancers on this fun-filled night. Enjoy Loralee Hyde and Kristin Downey’s photos.