Week 6 Prompt

 A little history before I tell you my idea:

Every year the town I work in puts on a Founder’s Day Parade. It is followed by booths and local businesses near downtown doing activities throughout the day at Paradise Springs (a local place that has a TON of events). The library has participated since it began a few years ago by dressing up as recognizable book characters, passing out candy, and doing face painting. It has been one of the best ways we can get people to recognize us in public and we generally see people come to the library in the following days to get cards or checkout materials. It is also coincidentally a month before Halloween. One year we had Frankenstein themed candy that went along with our book discussion and programs that we were putting on but we have never done a theme for all of us to dress up as. That same year we did a zombie walk. Two years ago we had Waldo, the Cat in the Hat, and Alice in Wonderland grace the streets of Wabash. I’ve passed out candy while wearing a library t-shirt and had a blast! We generally have a couple board members help us out by carrying our banner.

My twist on Founder’s Day with the library…

For this year’s Founder’s Day Parade we all dress up as horror characters. Not too scary but recognizable characters and authors from books, movies, or even games that will grab people’s attention. The characters just need to make people think of a scary character but not freak people out. Then after the parade we can have a booth of scary face paintings and a display of both books, movies, and board games that are horror themed for patrons to check out. Some ideas for characters that people would recognize are Carrie, It, Norman Bates, any Walking Dead character, Edgar Allan Poe, Dracula, Coraline, Nightmare Before Christmas characters, and Frankenstein’s Monster. Staff can pick whatever character they want as long as it is someone that we have within any of our collections. These outfits can be made easily from thrift store finds or we can look for costumes online like we have in the past. We can keep these costumes in storage for future program use. If staff members already have costumes that fit the theme they are more than welcome to wear them! We can pass out candy like we usually do and base it on the theme of horror, i.e. eyeballs or bloody fingers. We will put our library logo stickers on the candy so kids recognize who gave them the goodies. Once the parade is over we all stay in our outfits and head over to our booth in shifts. We will take books and movies that we dressed up as and even games like Betrayal on the House on the Hill, Mysterium, Villainous, and more. We can have a table set up for face painting and a table set up for our display. The stations can have staff members who are knowledgeable on the materials we have brought and a tablet so patrons can check out materials on site. If we don’t have a book, movie, or game they want to check out we can always place a hold on it for them to pick up. The books will span different age ranges and horror eras. We can have classics that everyone thinks about and some new authors. If we want to be creative with our display we could always deck out one of our carts and take it down with us instead of a table. The movies can be some of the ones we normally pull out for our Halloween display and we can put out some of the ones we dressed up as. Traditionally we do recognizable book characters for children but this year we should try to appeal to all ages while promoting the many items we have within our various collections. We would need to purchase outfits and candy but anything else we use will be items we already have.