A Halloween How-To

Costumes, Parties, Decorations, and Destinations

By Lesley Pratt Bannatyne

2001

First Published

4.08

Average Rating

272

Number of Pages

8H18M

Audio Length

What's the recipe for pumpkin soup? Where can you see the oldest Halloween parade in the United States? Have you ever wondered how to keep your carved pumpkin from decaying too quickly? If you're looking for information and instructions about every aspect of Halloween, you've come to the right place. A Halloween How-To is packed with ideas for October 31. There are fifty great costumes you can make yourself, recipes for everything from fake blood to pumpkin soup, and lists of great movies, CDs, and spooky books. Lesley Bannatyne has even assembled a number of games drawn from early twentieth-century Halloween celebrations, and includes sample text for party invitations. (Our Halloween: Romantic Art and Customs of Yesteryear postcards are great to use with these ) One of the nation's foremost authorities on Halloween, Lesley Pratt Bannatyne has shared her vast knowledge of the holiday in television specials for New England Cable News, Nickelodeon, and the History Channel. She was an invited speaker at the Global Halloween Convergence in 2000, and has also served as guest lecturer at the St. Louis Museum of Art. For more than twenty years, Ms. Bannatyne also has been active in the theater. She currently is co-director of Invisible Cities Group and co-artistic director of the Studebaker Theater. Ms. Bannatyne resides in Somerville, Massachusetts, and has been named one of "Boston's 100 Interesting Women" by Boston Woman magazine. Ms. Bannatyne's first book, Halloween: An American Holiday, An American History (pb original) is also available from Pelican.

Avg Rating

4.08

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

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4 STARS

45%

3 STARS

15%

2 STARS

1 STARS

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Author

Lesley Pratt Bannatyne

Author · 6 books

Lesley Bannatyne is an American author who writes extensively on Halloween, especially its history, literature, and contemporary celebration. She also writes short stories, many of which are included in her debut collection _Unaccustomed to Grace_, out from Kallisto Gaia Press in March, 2022. One of the country's foremost authorities on Halloween, Bannatyne has shared her knowledge on television specials for the History Channel ("The Haunted History of Halloween," "The Real Story of Halloween"), with Time Magazine, Slate, National Geographic, and contributed the Halloween article to World Book Encyclopedia. In 2007, she and several compatriots set the Guinness World Record for Largest Halloween Gathering, a title they held until 2009. Lesley has written five books on Halloween, ranging from a children's book, Witches Night Before Halloween, to Halloween Nation, which examines the holiday through the eyes of its celebrants. The book was nominated for a 2011 Bram Stoker Award. Her other titles are A Halloween How-To. Costumes, Parties, Destinations, Decorations (2001); A Halloween Reader. Poems, Stories, and Plays from Halloweens Past (2004), and Halloween. An American Holiday, An American History, celebrated 30 years in print in 2020. Her fiction and essays have been published in the Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Christian Science Monitor, and Zone 3, Pangyrus, Shooter, Craft, Ocotillo Review, Fish, and Bosque Literary Magazines. She won the 2018 Bosque fiction prize and received the 2019 Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for fiction, the 2020 Ghoststory.com fiction prize, and was a finalist for many others, including the Tennessee William Literary Festival Writing Award, the Carve Prose & Poetry Contest, and the Hudson Prize. As a freelance journalist, she covered stories ranging from druids in Massachusetts to relief workers in Bolivia. Lesley lives and works in Somerville, Massachusetts.