Digital invitation: Halloween tea party at 5:30

It's the Thursday before Halloween. Three pumpkins on the doorstep, a packet of paper lanterns on the hall table, and no invitation yet. You want six or seven children aged six to ten, the two neighbours, and the cousin who is afraid of nothing, all in your front room on Saturday at 5:30 for a Halloween tea. A digital invitation can be built and sent tonight: choose a design from the collection, fill in five fields, share the link.

Nothing here needs a designer, a printer or a group chat with forty messages. It needs a decision about the hour, one instruction the children will actually follow, and a link you can change when the plan does. The rest is decoration, and decoration is the part you can do with a candle and ten minutes.

The hour comes first: 5:30 with a torch in your hand

Set the time before you open the editor. 'Saturday 31st, 5:30, our house' fits into a message and settles the tea-or-dinner question before anyone asks it. At half five in late October it is still light when they arrive and nearly dark when they leave, which is the right amount of eerie for a seven-year-old. Then pick the single rule for the afternoon. Put 'bring your torch' in the line field and you have said everything: no costume code to explain, no sewing.

• The hour as you would say it out loud: 'Saturday 31st, 5:30'.
• One instruction instead of three: 'bring your torch'.
• The exact door: 'front room, side gate' beats a street name.
• A vertical photo of the doorstep with the pumpkins already lit.

How to make a digital invitation with five fields and nothing else

Open the collection, filter by style and try a design for free: in trial mode you edit the cover without paying, and buying unlocks every scene. Then fill the fields one at a time — label, names, date, time, place — plus one line. The character counter stops a long label from swallowing the hour, and the preview refreshes as you type. You are working in the browser, so there is nothing to install, and your guests need no app either.

Write that line in the language you will be speaking that afternoon. The site runs in seven languages and the invitation content can be set per language, so the same link can greet one set of parents in English and the grandparents in theirs. Add music if you want the afternoon to have a soundtrack. The RSVP questions are yours to write: whatever you need to know before Saturday, ask it there and the answers arrive in one place.

The pumpkin goes on the cover, not in the caption

You can upload up to six photos. Use one vertical shot of the porch with the pumpkins lit as the cover, and two or three from last year's tea further down as decoration. They frame themselves, you can mark which one is the cover, and you can swap any of them later if the pumpkin came out crooked. Keep it funny rather than frightening: a grinning pumpkin, a paper bat, a torch left on the stairs. A skull that makes a six-year-old cry turns a party into a babysitting job.

A Halloween tea doesn't need a theme. It needs an hour, one instruction the children repeat all week, and a link that still works when the plan changes.

Digital invitations that survive a change of plan at four o'clock

If the garden is soaked at four, move the tea to the front room, edit the place and the same link shows the new version. Nobody reprints an envelope, nobody screenshots, nobody turns up at the wrong door. Confirmations arrive inside the invitation in one ordered list, so you know how many paper cups to buy without chasing parents on WhatsApp. Guests open the link in a browser on a phone, or scan a QR code, and reply from there. The invitation costs €29.99, paid once, and you can edit it as often as you need. Choose a design, write the hour, add 'bring your torch' and send it.