Ver. 2.0

Damnit. I forgot all about my Halloween icons until today when I cleaning up some harddrive space. So now you get a short post with 60% LESS CONTENT THAN OUR NORMAL POSTS and all for the low, low, low price of FREE!

Where ya gonna beat a deal like that in this economy?!?

Ah, Halloween. The most wonderful night of the year. I haven't really dressed up for Halloween in years. It maybe because MDRF ends right before. Or maybe I just haven't had any really good costume ideas lately. I still love Halloween though but now the thrill for me is seeing all the little kids costumes and the decorating. The first could probably be attributed to being a father and I'm sure the later is directly related to owning a home.

I never really decorated the outside when I lived with my mother but ever since we bought a house, I'm all about the holiday decorations. Well, for cellymcfae's (and our budget's) sanity I limit my all out decorating to Halloween and Christmas. But Halloween is definitely my favorite.

I envy russell_moore's tactics. I too would love to scare the beejeebus out of some kids. The problems are A) our house has a big ol' street light right in front of it so it's not very dark. Plus we're supposed to leave our porch lights on if we're participating in Halloween. And B) we get a lot, like 80%, of very young children.

I try to limit the kitsch factor so I only have one inflatable. It's a 9-foot tall, hooded Grim Reaper and it's legs form a 6-foot arch. I place that at the end of the driveway every year. This year, in someone's yard, I saw an inflatable motorcycle with two skeletons riding it. I gotta tell ya, I was this. close. to getting it.

What I do have is several flashing lights in the windows, orange/purple light strings around the porch and shrubbery, blacklight bulbs for the garage sconces, a glowing skeleton that looks like it's rising from a grave, a medium sized articulated skeleton hanging by a noose from a small tree, five tombstones, and a smoke machine. Oh, and a really good CD of spooky noises. We also got 120 glow-in-the-dark bracelets ($0.16/each) from the dollar store and gave one to every child that showed up. Based on that we had about 115 spooky little visitors to the Castle MacDobhran Rave. "Dracula in da hiz-zouse!" Whoot-whoot!

Damn, when it's listed out like that it doesn't seem like nearly enough, does it?

That was this year. NEXT YEAR, I'm going to kick it up a notch. I realized that I should get a couple of flood lights (w/ blue filters) though because you can't really see the tombstones that well. I'm also going to move away from A-Bunch-of-Halloween-Stuff in the yard to a theme. What theme might that be, you ask? Pirate Halloween, baby! I'm already trying to figure out how to build a ship wreck in the front yard that is storable. I'm also trying to find as close to life-sized articulated skeletons that don't cost an arm and a leg.

Sorry. I don't know what came over me. You can close your mail clients now.

I don't think I can do it by next year but some day I'd really like to make some animatronics. A skeletal pirate walking the plank, a drunk pirate leaning against a tombstone, a hanging pirate still kicking... and I've got a few other ideas too. cellymcfae came up with the idea of giving out those chocolate dubloons and other pirate candy. The best part is that my costume should be pretty easy from now on!