Happy Halloween

Now a Halloween veteran.

October 31, 3010 – See? This is exactly why I start celebrating Halloween in September. The season always speeds by like it has some other place it needs to be, some other land over which it needs to spread its darkly festive pall. Today's the last day we can festoon our houses with charnel fodder, close our eyes and pick a channel at random to watch a horror movie, or eat candy bars for breakfast.

Thanks to God, Sunday is by far the most un-spooky day of the week. I’ve always thought Fridays and Tuesdays to be the most spooky, by the way, although I have no good reason for feeling that way. However, when Halloween falls on a day in the weekend, be it the Lord’s day or Sat’s day, it’s great…because you can do everything Halloween throughout, experiencing a microcosm of the whole season in a single day.

For instance, you can go somewhere seasonal in the morning, watch movies and make treats in the afternoon, and still have time to greet trick-or-treaters that night. When it’s on a weekday, you rush home from work, hand out candy, and then Halloween is pretty much done after that. After all, it's not the fat lady singing that signals the end of Halloween...it's the fat kid begging for candy.

And then tomorrow we get to go through a sort of culture shock, where the world changes completely overnight, where gummy severed body parts, pumpkin faces, and rubber monster masks just don't exist and are instead replaced with flying reindeer, snowmen, and gingerbread houses. Actually, that sounds more like culture electrocution. If it wasn't for that imminent Christmas season, November 1 would be the worst day of the year. As it is, that nadir occurs on December 26. Maybe January 2.


By my rough calculations, this Halloween 2010 blog clocked 36 entries, totaling more than 30,000 words and over 300 pictures. But there was so much I didn’t get to, all the haunted house attractions we visited, all the movie and specials we watched, all the stories we read, all the macabre places we saw, all the events and press we did for publicity for the Grimpendium. Heck, I even visited a castle this season. A castle, for goodness sake, and I didn’t get a chance to write about it.

Yeah, I didn't get around to writing about
this little adventure.

Despite all that activity, Halloween day itself is traditionally a sedate one for us. We have a DVR full of Halloween programming that we need to get through before the trick-or-treaters invade, all kinds of candy to shove down our gullets before we go on our November fast in preparation for a gluttony of Christmas confections, and just doing whatever we can to stretch this day out as long as possible.

Tonight, if past years are any indication, we’ll prepare for trick-or-treaters and wait for friends to come over after they finish trick-or-treating with their kids, and then we’ll hang out, give out candy together, and dread all the de-decorating tomorrow.

 Below are a few parting shots. Happy Halloween.

  

Party's over. Time to sweep up and go home.