A Ghostly Gathering Halloween Party Invitations

By Roy Nuhn

As seen in The Antique Shoppe Newspaper, October 2008 

By the time the 20th century had arrived, nearly all Americans were celebrating Halloween. Parties, where food was served and all sorts of supernatural, ghostly games played, had become popular in the last decades of the 19th century.  

Though the craze had lessened, parties were still favorite holiday affairs, especially in small towns.  

But once you decided to throw a party, settled on a theme, chose your own costume - be it homemade from a Butterick pattern or ready-made from a favorite local variety store or five-and-dime downtown, and came up with all the games, accessories and paraphernalia, just how did you go about inviting your friends or relatives?  

Well, you could make your own invitations. In the October 1913 issue of Woman's Home Companion, Gabriella Rosiere, in her article titled, "A Halloween Party", she went to great lengths telling hostesses, young and old alike, how to make double-fold, ready-to-mail invitations. But almost everyone preferred to trek down to their favorite shopping haven and purchase printed party invitations. These came packaged with about 10 or 12 cards of the same design and mailing envelopes.  

Most were mailed, often in pictorial envelopes decorated with Halloween symbols. They were meant to be read, held onto for a short while, and then discarded. In some sections of the country, though, social etiquette called for invitations to be delivered in person, or by messenger. This was especially true in many parts of the South.  

The folded greeting styles usually have black and orange illustrations on the front. Pictorials range from black cats and witches to costumed children and Jack 0' lanterns. Another variety, the single card stock, often have no pictures, being no more than a printed party announcement with the details to be filled in by hand.  

During the picture postcard craze, from about 1904 to 1914 and for a while in the 1920s, Halloween party invitation postcards were also sold. These also came in bundles of 10 or 12 of the same illustration. The lack of privacy they afforded while in transit to recipients, unfortunately, was a liability and affected sales. Images tended to be similar to those found on regular invitations, though frequently with better color.  

For us today, collecting party invitations for the most ghostly of days is a bit difficult. Their relative scarcity results from their intended temporary nature. Most of the party invitations that have come down to us are unused, suggesting that quite likely they were leftover retail and wholesale stock.  

As fascinating as these invitations are to us today, they were never intended to be collected or saved as was other holiday ephemera of the era. They were planned to serve a purely functional purpose, not to be lasting mementos. Therefore design, coloring and overall quality were skimped on by their publishers. The illustrations created for them were not meant to be beautiful. They simply announced that a party was going to be held on All Hallow's Eve and told you to get a costume and come on over!  

The truly big publishing houses, with one notable exception, avoided marketing Halloween invitations. Most were printed by unidentified publishers, never by the likes of Raphael Tuck & Sons, E. Nash, Sam Gabriel Sons, or International Art. The exception was the Whitney Company, based in Worcester, Massachusetts, which sold many that were the equal of the company's general line of Halloween greetings cards and souvenir postcards Some of the Whitney's are considered to be the best of all.  

Halloween parties, now heavily concentrating on dancing, spooning, and alcohol, continued to be the "cat's meow" well into the Roaring Twenties in certain sections of the nation.  

While partying was slowly given way to the takeover of the holiday by children, who preferred such activities as trick-or-treating and prank playing, invitations continued to sold in stores, but in declining numbers.  

Whitney, since they published holiday greeting cards in the early years of the 1920s, also kept on making party Halloween invitations. But sales were not good and remainder stocks could be found in the nation's Woolworth's and Newberry's for another ten to twenty years. As late as the 1950s. collectors were picking them off of store racks. By the end of the decade, firms like Hallmark, Gibson, and Rustcraft, with their folded-card-and envelope merchandise, reigned as leaders in the greeting card industry. However, their merchandise holds little  appeal to today's collectors Extremely rare are privately printed, Halloween party invitations, especially advertising. Some announced local happenings, such as a restaurant's Halloween festivities, and were printed locally. Most date between 1915 and 1920s. Often they pictured the infamous Salem witch of early Massachusetts legend.  

Searching for old party invitation is certainly an exciting and challenging, though often frustrating adventure. But the rewards of finding such cards when you do, are well worth the hunt.

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