Digital invitation: a Halloween neighbours' marquee dinner

Twenty neighbours, one white marquee in the field behind the houses, and a group chat that has been running since Tuesday. Someone asks the time; someone else asks what to bring. By Thursday the answers are buried under pumpkin emojis and a photo of a cat in a witch hat. A digital invitation for a Halloween neighbours' dinner in a marquee does the work of all those messages: you pick a design from the collection, add your own words and photos, and the link can be with everyone tonight.

This is the practical version: the start time, the plate, the rain plan, and the one line that stops four people bringing the same tortilla. So nobody is scrolling back through forty messages at seven in the evening.

Halloween neighbours' dinner in a marquee: lanterns at 8pm

Give the evening a starting gun. Not 'come over around eight' but 'lanterns and candles at 8pm, under the marquee'. People turn up at 7.45 because there is something to watch. Add the end time too, 'candles out at 11.30pm', and the families with small children decide for themselves whether to stay for pudding, without sending you a separate message. If the marquee sits down a track, give a landmark that works in the dark.

• Start and finish: lanterns at 8pm, candles out at 11.30pm. Two lines, no 'ish'.
• Where: 'third bend after the gate with the pumpkins, next to the meadow'. Something you can find with a torch in one hand.
• One line on clothes: 'it's a field, so wellies beat heels'.
• What to bring, in numbers: one savoury or one sweet dish for twelve, split by house number.

Write the plate as a number and the rain plan as an address

'Bring something to share' ends with seven bowls of crisps and nothing for pudding. 'One savoury dish for twelve' ends with a table. Split it by house: odd numbers bring savoury, even numbers bring sweet. One sentence, on the invitation, argument settled before it starts, and the vegans on the street can see who is doing what.

The rain plan gets written before you send anything, not improvised at seven in the evening. 'If it rains, we're at number 4, the gate with the pumpkins.' Then give a decision time: 'we look at the sky at 6pm and the invitation will say marquee or house.' When you switch it, you edit the invitation and the link stays exactly as it was, so nobody has to hunt for the new message.

The invitation isn't the decoration. It's the plan: what time, what plate, and where we go if the sky changes its mind.

How to create a digital invitation that ends the second WhatsApp message

Pick a design, test the cover in the free preview before you pay, then fill the fields: heading, date, time, place, your own line. Up to six photos of your own, the empty marquee at sunset, the pumpkins by the gate, the table already laid, and you choose which one is the cover. Confirmations land in a list inside the invitation, and you write the questions yourself, so you can ask how many are coming and what they're bringing. Guests open it in a browser on a phone, a laptop or the tablet in the communal hallway. Nothing to install.

What a digital invitation for this dinner costs, and what changes

One price: 29.99 EUR per invitation, paid once, no subscription. Things will change. A guest count, a start time, the call about the marquee. Edit it and the same link shows the updated version. You don't need a printer for digital Halloween invitations, and you don't need to knock on nineteen doors. If part of the street reads in another language, the invitation content can be set in any of the seven languages the site runs in.

If this year's dinner happens under the marquee, build the invitation in an afternoon and let the link carry the logistics: time, plate by house number, house number four as plan B. By the time the first pumpkin is lit, everyone already knows where to go.