Halloween, best holiday ever. EVAR!
I seriously love Halloween. I just get a kick out of it. I love carving pumpkins, eating pumpkin seeds, decorating, and generally scaring the hell out of people. Unfortunately, with my schedule this year, I won’t be able to get home for Halloween. My mother and I have a tradition of doing a haunted porch, which actually draws a crowd. My mother dresses up as a witch, and I dress up as a stuffed monster, and together we provide fright for all ages.
We have it down to a science at this point. I spookify the porch and the yard (cloth over the couches, tombstones, etc), stuff a few dummy monsters, and then the fun begins. My mother sits at the far end of the porch, and the kids have to weave in-between the monsters to get their candy from her. It’s always a game of which monster is real this year (what was great was my second freshman year my roommate came home with me and was a second “stuffed monster,” something we had never done before, quite a few people were more than surprised that night). My mother alone is enough to frighten (she’s got a witches cackle down pat) the smallest of children (or comfort them if need be), so I stay a stuffed monster in those cases. Where I get my amusement is scaring the kids that are “too cool” to be trick-or-treating. Those teenagers who no longer dress up, and are simply in it for the candy (even towards the end of my trick-or-treating years, I still dressed up) are my goal for the night, well, them and the parents of the small children. It really is a great feeling getting someone who doesn’t think they can be scared anymore.
My mother has been doing the witch thing for more than 20 years now (first at the door, and then we moved out to the porch), and I’ve been doing the stuffed monster bit since I gave up trick-or-treating (which was some time in middle school, that’s all I remember). The only time I haven’t been occupying my spot on the porch in the last 10 years was my first freshman year, when I didn’t have any means of getting back home for the day (instead, to celebrate the day, my mother sent me a Guild cake). So we’ve been at it for a while, and as I said, it’s down to a science, which has allowed me to get the entire yard and porch setup in an afternoon. Which was great, when I was working, I could take a half day, and the last two years in school, my schedule was such that I could leave at noon or Halloween was on a weekend.
The problem this year lies in a lab that I have that goes until 2:20. Which mean I wouldn’t be home until sometime approaching 5, which would only give me an hour to setup, which wouldn’t quite work. My mother also has classes on Monday nights, and Halloween being on a Monday night only further complicates things. So for the first time in 20 years, my mother’s going to take a break from the haunting, and being stuck at school, I’m hanging up my mask for the year as well. It’s going to be odd in the neighborhood this year for it. I know a lot of people look forward to it, but we just don’t have the time this year.
And while I’m reminiscing, the other neat thing that I like about only setting up the porch the night of Halloween is that our house goes from normal in the morning, haunted by evening, and then back to normal by the morning. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that adds to the mystique. Don’t get me wrong, I like houses that put up Halloween decorations for the few weeks before Halloween (best holiday ever, duh), it’s just that’s not something we’ve ever done. The witch comes to Woodbine for one night and one night only.
But on the upside of not being able to go home this year is that I’ve found kindred spirits at school, that is, others who love Halloween. So the three of us carved pumpkins and sorted seeds until after midnight on Friday night (after procuring them from a pumpkin patch hours earlier). Not wanting to limit my pumpkin carving fun, I opted to get two pumpkins, a little one and a big one. The big one got the tradition jack-o-lantern carved in it, but as you can see above, the second smaller one (that I actually did first) was carved as Jack Skellington from A Nightmare Before Christmas, and it came out quite well, if I do say so myself (and I do). The funniest part was that I had both of my pumpkins finished before either of the girls I was carving with had their one finished. Good times indeed.