What do you want on your tombstone?

The All Saints' Halloween party is coming up at my old parish and this year the moms' group is giving back, reinvesting in the parish that has built them up, cared for them, and provided for them. The group is doing this by planning and hosting the event on November 1st. Since I'm still an active member of the moms' group there (it's so, so wonderful) I'm helping with the party plans.

The goal of the party is this:
for the ultra sanitized Harvest Party and the horribly secularized and even evil Halloween* to meet in the middle and be Catholic. I want it to look like a Halloween party at first glance but to be filled with opportunities for parents and kids to have fun and learn about their faith - to give parents an opportunity to teach their kids about their faith in a way that's not lame or dorky but fun.

We want things to be a little different this year so the kids who came in the past won't think it's the same old thing. We're not throwing everything out, just rotating some out, some in, and lining up some other things to be rotated out next year. This year I think we may have a bouncy house shaped like a castle for the little kids. Maybe it'll be St. King Wenceslas' castle. One of the women in the group suggested crowns for all the saints, which I think would be a great craft station. We're going to have a soccer game in honor of our athletic JPII and in my dreams we'd have rock climbing wall for Pier Giorgio.

You can see all the games, food, and decorations we had at last year's party if you're looking for some ideas, but I'd also like your help. Do you know of any cute games or craft stations? What about food with saint tie-ins? Like St. Francis' animal crackers and that sort of thing.

Also, tell me what you'd want on your tombstone.

I had the idea of making a cemetery for the guests to walk through as they entered the party. Instead of the evil and scary tombstones I wanted these to be old looking, yes, but also Christian and, more importantly, to have saint names on them. So Teresa of Calcutta, Fulton Sheen, Maximilian Kolbe, Edith Stein, and so on.

Another woman in the group dislikes that idea and thinks it will make the party guests focus on death and not on the eternal life that the saints are enjoying. She would prefer a graveyard with puny names.

And the third option, of course, is that it's just a bad idea and we shouldn't have a cemetery at all.

What do you think? What do you vote for? If you were coming to the party what would you prefer?
Thanks for your help.


*I'm not saying that every Halloween celebration is evil. We do Halloween with decorations, trick-or-treating, kid appropriate but spooky stories and tv specials. Just so you know, I am not anti Halloween. Not at all!


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