Hocus Pocus Party: How to Throw the Best Hocus Pocus 2 Watch Party

Hocus Pocus is one of our family’s FAVORITE Halloween movies. We watch it repeatedly every year. Not always together necessarily. With four kids from 4 to 15, it can be hard to carve out family time between school, work schedules, sports, and social calendars. The teenagers especially cringe when we announce “Family Time.” But recently, the older two reminded me that we had not planned a themed dinner in quite some time. This is something we used to do regularly, particularly with Disney movies. I usually planned them as part of our countdowns to trips we had planned to Disneyworld. Since we don’t have any Disney trips on the calendar, I just have not thought much of them. When I realized Hocus Pocus 2 would be released on September 30, I knew we had to create an amazing Hocus Pocus-themed dinner and watch party!

Hocus Pocus 2 Menu. I started first with planning the party food. I have some horribly picky eaters in my brood, so meals can be a challenge at times. Especially for a party, I wanted it to be fun and not start an argument over the menu. To that end, we had what was supposed to be Ghost Mozzarella Pizza (see my fail below), Witch Hat Garlic Bread and a Sanderson Sisters Charcuterie Board. To drink, we had Witch’s Potion chilled with Frozen Eyeballs. For dessert, we had Book Brownies, Spider Eggs, Broomsticks, and Halloween sugar cookies. Here’s how I made this deliciously fun spread:

1. Ghost Mozzarella Pizza. I landed on pizza for the main dish. But I knew I wanted to Hocus Pocus-ize it. So, I decided to take a ghost cookie cutter to cut fresh mozzarella to give our pizza a Halloween twist. It was a great idea, except that I should’ve added the mozzarella near the end of baking the pizza. My ghosts just melted into gooey, though delectable, blobs of unrecognizable mozzarella. Definite fail. But, it tasted great, so there’s that. I was much more successful with the rest of the party food!
2. Sanderson Sisters Charcuterie Board. I had a blast creating the Sanderson Sisters Charcuterie Board. With my family’s varying tastes, a great charcuterie board is perfect. I include foods that each person likes, so everyone can enjoy it. And I shop for most of the items I include in my charcuterie boards at Aldi. Creating boards can get expensive, but, at Aldo, I usually find most of what I need at affordable prices. In putting it together, I started with their faces and worked out from there. Pro tip: use toothpicks for Winifred’s “hair” – it’ll make it so much easier. For this particular board, here is what I used:
   • Three wheels of brie
   • Pepperoni
   • White cheddar cheese cubes
   • Blackberries
   • Strawberries
   • Green Grapes
   • Mandarin orange slices
   • Garden Veggie Chips Ghosts + Bats
   • Utz Halloween Bats and Jacks Pretzel Treats
   • Blue corn tortilla chips
3. Witch Hat Garlic Bread. For these, I took Pillsbury Crescent Rolls and laid them out on a baking sheet. I brushed each one with garlic butter. I laid some provolone cheese strips on the wide end of each roll. Instead of rolling them up, I just folded up the bottom to look like a hat. I added another strip of provolone along the “rim” of the hat. You could add a slice of black olive here to look like a buckle for the hat, but no one in my family likes olives. So I chose not to add them.
4. Witch’s Potion with Eyeball Ice Cubes. I found these fun ice trays at Target, so I decided to use that with our potion. I filled the ice tray up with green Hawaiian punch and froze it for a couple of hours. For the “potion,” I just mixed Sprite and the green Hawaiian punch. This is way too sugary of a drink for me, but the kids loved it. They don’t get sugary drinks often, so they really thought this was fun. However, none of them liked the gummy eyeballs once they thawed from the ice cubes. They said they had a very strange texture. At the end of the day, the looked perfect for the punch, but I’m not sure that I would buy them again.
5. Book Brownies. We had quite a bit going on early in the day of our Movie Night, so I opted to make box brownies instead of from scratch. Our favorite box brownie mix is the Ghirardelli Chocolate Supreme, but any batch of brownies will work. Once cooked, I simply added candy eyes and used black gel icing to make the designs on the brownies. To be honest, black cookie icing tube may have worked better, but I already had the gel icing on hand.
6. Spider Eggs. My mother-in-law brought the kids powdered sugar donut holes a couple days before the Hocus Pocus party. I decided to cheat a bit and use them for our dessert table as spider eggs!
7. Broomsticks. Just about the easiest Halloween treat to make, these consist of pretzel sticks and Reese’s miniature cups.
8. Halloween sugar cookies. Our four-year-old saw these at Target when we were shopping for some of the items I needed for the party. I thought they’d be a fun addition. To be honest, the coloring used in them was fairly bitter. Plus, they left an unpleasant aftertaste in your mouth. I can’t say that I’d recommend them.

Hocus Pocus Decor and Activities. For the decor, we simply decorated as we would for Halloween. I really did not do anything beyond that other than adding a few decorative witch hats and such. I planned on printing out a few Hocus Pocus movie quotes but frankly ran out of time. It can be challenging to come up with activities that appeal to our wide age ranges, but I think everyone had fun with the games we played.

• I Smell Children. We placed “smelly” things into brown paper bags. To prepare it, my husband just walked around the house finding things he thought had a strong scent. He ended up with vinegar, an orange, mint toothpaste, ____ and ____. He numbered the bags 1 through 5. Each of the kids wrote 1 through 5 on a piece of paper. My husband walked each bag around to each kid and, with their eyes closed, let them smell it. Then, they wrote what they thought they smelled on their paper. The most correct answers won. The kids laughed, gagged, and groaned as we played, but they all thought it was fun.
• Witch Hat Ring Toss. We played this with glow necklaces and a witch hit from our Halloween decorations. We had trouble with the hat falling over, so I ended up wearing it to help it maintain its shape. Each person threw four rings to see who could get them most around the hat. Out of five people, we ended in a three-way tie. After a tie-breaker shoot out, our 10-year-old declared victory! Despite its simplicity and fairly high cheesiness factor, the kids enjoyed it. They really got into and had a lot of fun with it.

Hocus Pocus 2 Main Event. We ended our Hocus Pocus party night with the main event of watching Hocus Pocus 2. We made some popcorn, snuggled up on the couch, and watched, desperately hoping it lived up to the original. Our final thoughts on the sequel:

• Eric: Didn’t like it. Thought the original was way better.
• Kelly: Loved it. The original is still a classic, but I loved the backstory. I loved the music. I loved the new characters. I thought it was great.
• Mayson (15): Really liked it. Still like the original better, but 2 is really good.
• Sophia (14): Liked it, but doesn’t compare to the original.
• Olivia (10): Loved loved loved it! Better than the first!
• Ellianna (4): Asks to watch it every day, so I’m pretty sure that means she loved it!

I’m claiming our Hocus Pocus party to be a full success. We succeeded in herding our kids for some uninterrupted, quality family time for several hours. The food worked out perfectly. It looked great. No one complained about there being nothing they liked to eat. And, it was wickedly on theme! Despite being a tad bit hokey, everyone had fun with our activities. For the main event, most of us loved Hocus Pocus 2. Don’t mind the grumpy old man’s opinion! He’s not a big fan of sequels in general. Did you have a Hocus Pocus party to celebrate the sequel? Tell us what you did in the comments! To read about more adventures from G6 Adventures, click here.