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Halloween Parties in New York:

Halloween NYC Parties 2012

Halloween NYC Parties, October 30-31. NYC's scariest Halloween events invites all ghouls, vampires, witches and ghosts to come out to this year's spookiest Halloween balls, bashes, brawls and extravaganzas. HalloweenNYC.com covers New York's Halloween parties, the costumes, the wicked West Village Halloween parade and the crazy NYC street scene. Buy online tickets or order tickets by phone. Saturday night is Halloween Eve with tricks and treats at featured clubs, bars, lounges and private event spaces. Sunday is an all day Halloween affair ending with Joonbug's Famous 9th Annual Masquerade Ball at Capitale, a NYC world renowned private event space. New York City is known for outrageous Halloween costumes so let your creativity lose. HalloweenNYC.com gathers the best of costumes and decorations to help you. Let your inner ghoul, fool, and spook out for the night. Drink the witch's brew and cast your spells. Get ready and let the devil in you select a daring costume to parade in this year. Stumped for a costume idea, let HalloweenNYC.com show you what is hot and where to buy it. Or better yet, make your own costume mixing and matching vintage, that old outfit in the back of your closet and stuff in your trunk. HalloweenNYC.com will be out this year again with camera crews capturing all the fun of New York's Halloween scene.

NYC Village Halloween Parade 2012

New York Village Halloween Parade Overview

All Those in Costume are Welcome to Join Hundreds of Puppets, 53 Bands of Different Types of Music, Dancers and Artists, and Thousands of other New Yorkers in Costumes of their Own Creation in the Nation's Most Wildly Creative Public Participatory Event in the Greatest City in the World!

For all those in costume is on 6th Avenue South of Spring Street and North of Canal between 6:30 and 8:30 p.m.
Alert ! ONLY enter the line-up on 6th Ave. from the East and South between Canal and Spring.

Watch it in person on 6th Avenue from Spring Street to 21st Street from 7 - 10 p.m. Live on NY 1 Television from 8 - 9:30 p.m.

Halloween NYC Parade Route

Don't bring your car to the Parade!

If you are coming in a group, meet somewhere away from the Line-up and walk to the line-up together. The Parade takes until 8:15 to move out. Join the Parade at the beginning and approach the Line-up only from the South and the East.
Streets West of 6th are closed by the Police.

Take These Trains To These Stations

A West 4 Street
C, E West 4 Street, Spring Street
B, D West 4 Street, Broadway/Lafayette St.
F 23 St, 14 St, West 4 St. B'way/Lafayette St.
N, R 23 St, 14.Union Sq, 8 St, Prince St
1, 9 Christopher Street
2, 3 14 Street
4, 5 14 Street/Union Square
6 23 St, 14 St/Union Sq, Astor Place
PATH 9th St, 14th St, 23rd St

24 Hour NYC Travel Information: 718-330-1234

You Are Invited To Be In New York's Halloween Parade

Follow these 5 Simple Steps for Joining the Parade, the largest public participatory event in the greatest city in world!

  1. Be Creative - Wear Your Costume ! Only costumed marchers are allowed in the Parade.
  2. Show Up on Sixth Ave bet. Spring & Broome Sts.
  3. Arrive between 6:30 and 8:30 or you might miss the Parade! The subway is the best way to get there, parking is always difficult and the Parade makes it even worse.
  4. Find your Friends, Good Music or A Group to March With
  5. Follow the Crowd Up Sixth Avenue (please do not go down Sixth Avenue, the police will stop you!)

When You Get to the End of the Parade at 22nd Street continue on to our party Joonbug's 9th Annual Masquerade Halloween Ball at Capitale
Don't have a costume? ...then volunteer to carry a puppet!

How To Volunteer

Yes, its puppet season again, and 38th Annual Village Halloween Parade is searching for some people who can pull a few strings for us. Whether you are a veteran of previous Parades, or a newcomer who wants to see the Parade from the inside this year, we welcome you to come and perform with us. No previous experience with 20 foot tall glowing caterpillars or dancing skeletons is necessary.

Click Here to Volunteer

HALLOWEEN NYC PARADE FACT SHEET 2012

Now in its 39th year, New York's Village Halloween Parade is...

  • The nation's largest public Halloween celebration
  • Named as The Greatest Event on Earth by Festivals International for October 31
  • Attended by over 2 million people, seen by over 1 million on TV
  • The nation's only major night Parade
  • Listed as one of the 100 Things to do Before You Die

New York's 39th Annual Village Halloween Parade Theme 2012:

THE " i " OF THE BEHOLDER

Each year the parade organizers choose a theme for the NYC Halloween Parade: this is the description of the parade theme in their own words.

THE " i " OF THE BEHOLDER

What is it about the Disembodied Eye that is at once so disturbing and yet so strangely familiar?

Tradition associates the all-seeing eye with inescapable power and authority--coldly remote, yet as near to us as the back of a dollar bill. From the Masonic Eye-in-the-Pyramid, to the Thousand-eyed Avalokateswara (whose eyes emanate from his palms), to the Glowing Eye of HAL 9000, the disembodied eye evokes the ancient awe of omniscience and the modern anxiety of surveillance.

But all this has suddenly started to change. Lewis Hyde recounts a tale in which Coyote the Trickster learns to throw his eyeballs high into a tree to sight distant prey on the horizon. We, too, are learning Coyote's trick of remote viewing, sending our eyes out into the world and pixel-by-pixel crafting a parallax view of ourselves. Where we once hid from Big Brother's ubiquitous gaze, now--with every Youtube upload, with every Facebook post, and every Google (Go ogle!) search, we revel in our own reflections, no matter how mundane. The anonymous eye of authority now lies in the palm of our hand. "They" have become "We", and we have become eyes. Like the eye-covered body of Argus in Greek myth, we have become a matrix of ever-wakeful omnivorous observers.

But in the end, Coyote's eyes get stuck in the tree. Having lost vision of his own, he stumbles on with borrowed eyes.
As the technology of Facebook and Flickr offers us the possibility of seeing everything, we risk seeing nothing but ourselves, eyes wide shut, in a collective feast of Narcissism. Argus, for all his vigilance, is slain by Hermes (God of Communication), and for his sacrifice, is turned into a peacock.

This year the Village Halloween Parade stares back at the disembodied eye, as we celebrate I of the Beholder. Parade artists Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles of Superior Concept Monsters will lead a cloud of floating eyes up Sixth Avenue, inviting everyone to join, both physically and virtually.

We are calling for video images of your eyes (one eye, actually, close up) to be projected onto our Great Eyeball high in the Parade sky,
in a succession of images at once intimate and anonymous. Send your entry to halloweeneyeballs@gmail.com
We will post them on YouTube so everyone can see each others!

After years of being electronically ogled, captured, and youtubed en route, we are returning your gaze, with a thousand borrowed eyes, and with a lot of help at our annual puppet workshops in October.

Come and lend a hand or an eye at www.halloween-nyc.com/volunteer.

Here's looking at you, kids . . .

Jeanne Fleming - Director

Alex Kahn - Master Puppeteer

Halloween NYC Costume Workshops

Every weekend in September and October prior to the Parade, Village Halloween Parade Puppet Building workshops will be hosted by the Official Puppeteers of the Parade, Superior Concept Monsters, at our Puppetry Workshop in the Hudson Valley near Rhinebeck, NY. In return for your help, you get lunch and dinner, a spectacular walk to the Hudson River and a bonfire.

Spend the day or the weekend out of the City and in our Puppet Barn...there is always a big pot of soup, some hot cider, tea, coffee and cookies to fill out a day of good company while learning techniques and actually constructing the puppets that will appear at the head of the Parade on Halloween night.

These workshops are free and open to the public, but spaces are limited, so you must pre-register by signing up to be a Volunteer. You must provide your own transportation and housing if you plan to stay the weekend.

Vehicle Guidelines for Halloween NYC

The tradition of the Village Halloween Parade is to invite anyone in costume to join the parade -- and typically 20,000 to 30,000 people take advantage of that invitation every year! Because of the number of costumed celebrants on foot, and the complications of people in costume, distracted, having a good time, sometimes with limited vision due to a costume, and stopping and entertaining the crowd on the sidewalks -- we regret that only a limited number of motorized vehicles are allowed in the Village Halloween Parade.

Those limited spaces are usually given to the handful of sponsors who support the parade, as a thank-you for their support. And even those vehicles must meet strict rules about the size, sound systems, capacity, and contents of the vehicle; and require prior arrangement with the parade to get official permits.

Finally, sorry to say this, but because our first concern is for the safety and enjoyment of the general public, motorized vehicles that just 'show-up' at the parade will be kindly requested not to join the celebration.

Thanks for your understanding and, Happy Halloween!

2012 Halloween Village Parade Links

2012 HALLOWEEN PARTIES

The History of Halloween Tradition

Halloween is the one of the oldest holidays still celebrated today. Halloween is also one of the most popular holidays, second only to Christmas. Today, millions of people celebrate Halloween without knowing its origins and myths, but it you're like me, knowing a little of the history and facts that surround Halloween make it all the more fascinating.

Beyond costume parties and trick-or-treating, the origins of Halloween can be traced to the Celtic New Year. The Romans, the Christian Church and, ultimately, our commercialized society revised and reinvented this holiday, but inside the modern traditions traces of Halloween's ancient past still remain.

Halloween's origins lie in an ancient Celtic festival. The Celtic people were a loose collection of tribes that, in the distant past, lived across much of Europe. They never formed an empire in any sense of the word, but were rather highly independent collection of clans - which allowed more organized folks, like the Romans to eventually conqueor them.

On the night of October 31, the Celts of ancient Ireland celebrated Samhain (pronounced - sow-in) in England, the festival was called Calan Gaef (pronounced - kalan-geyf.) They celebrated their new year on November 1. The Celts believed that Samhain, the night before the new year, marked the end of summer, the harvest, and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year when the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became became thin, allowing spirits - both harmless and harmful - to pass through.

It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks, typically consisting of animal heads and skins to disguise themselves and thus avoid harm. Since not all spirits were friendly, the Celts also left gifts and treats out to pacify the evil and ensure next years crops would be plentiful. This custom evolved into Halloween trick-or-treating.

The Celts thought that the presence of the otherworldly spirits made it easier to make predictions about the future. For a people entirely dependent on the volatile natural world, these prophecies were an important source of comfort and direction during the long, dark winter. Some of the ancient divinatory rituals have survived down to today in the form of games like "bobbing for apples." Apples were special fruit to the Celts. At the heart of the Celtic Otherworld grows an apple tree whose fruit has magical properties. Old sagas tell of heroes crossing the western sea to find this wondrous country. At Samhain, the apple harvest is in, and old hearthside games, such as apple-bobbing, called apple-dookin' in Scotland, reflect the journey across water to obtain the magic apple.

By A.D. 43, the Romans had conquered the majority of the Celtic lands. In the course of the four hundred years that they ruled the Celtic regions, two Roman festivals of Roman origin were combined with the traditional Celtic celebration of Samhain. The first was Feralia, a day in late October when the Romans traditionally commemorated the passing of the dead. The second was a day to honor Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. The symbol of Pomona is the apple and the incorporation of this celebration into Samhain probably helped keep the tradition of "bobbing" for apples going. Eventually the influence of Christianity spread into the Celtic lands.

In the seventh century, Pope Boniface IV designated November 1 All Saints' Day, a time to honor saints and martyrs. It is widely believed today that the pope was attempting to replace the Celtic festival of the dead with a related, but church-sanctioned holiday. The celebration was also called All-hallows or All-hallowmas (from Middle English Alholowmesse meaning All Saints' Day) and the night before it, the night of Samhain, began to be called All-hallows Eve and, eventually, Halloween. Even though the church altered the holiday, it was celebrated similarly to Samhain, with big bonfires, parades, and dressing up in costumes as saints, angels, and devils. Together, the three celebrations, the eve of All Saints', All Saints', and All Souls', were called Hallowmas.

As European immigrants came to America, they brought their varied Halloween customs with them. Because of the rigid Protestant belief systems that characterized early New England, the celebration of Halloween in colonial times was extremely limited there. As the beliefs and customs of different European ethnic groups, as well as the American Indians, meshed, a distinctly American version of Halloween began to emerge. The first celebrations included "play parties," public events held to celebrate the harvest, where neighbors would share stories of the dead, tell each other's fortunes, dance, and sing. By the middle of the nineteenth century, annual autumn festivities were common, but Halloween was not yet celebrated everywhere in the country.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, America was flooded with new immigrants. These new immigrants, particularly the millions of Irish fleeing Ireland's potato famine of 1846, helped to popularize the celebration of Halloween nationally. Taking from Irish and English traditions, Americans began to dress up in costumes and go house to house asking for food or money, a practice that eventually became today's "trick-or-treat" tradition. Young women believed that, on Halloween, they could divine the name or appearance of their future husband by doing tricks with yarn, apple parings, or mirrors. In the late 1800s, there was a move in America to mold Halloween into a holiday more about community and neighborly get-togethers, than about ghosts, pranks, and witchcraft.

At the turn of the century, Halloween parties for both children and adults became the most common way to celebrate the day. Parties focused on games, foods of the season, and festive costumes. Parents were encouraged by newspapers and community leaders to take anything "frightening" or "grotesque" out of Halloween celebrations. Because of their efforts, Halloween lost most of its superstitious and religious overtones by the beginning of the twentieth century.

By the 1920s and 1930s, Halloween had become a secular, but community-centered holiday, with parades and town-wide parties as the featured entertainment. Despite the best efforts of many schools and communities, vandalism began to plague Halloween celebrations in many communities during this time. By the 1950s, town leaders had successfully limited vandalism and Halloween had evolved into a holiday directed mainly at the young. Due to the high numbers of young children during the fifties baby boom, parties moved from town civic centers into the classroom or home, where they could be more easily accommodated. Between 1920 and 1950, the centuries-old practice of trick-or-treating was also revived. Trick-or-treating was a relatively inexpensive way for an entire community to share the Halloween celebration. In theory, families could also prevent tricks being played on them by providing the neighborhood children with small treats. A new American tradition was born, and it has continued to grow.

Today, Americans spend an estimated $6.9 billion annually on Halloween, making it the country's second largest commercial holiday. Of course, whether we're trick or treating, bobbing for apples, or dressing in costumes, each one of these Halloween traditions relies on the good will of the very same "spirits" whose presence the early Celts felt so keenly. Ours is not such a different holiday after all!