Now is the time for goblins
Do you believe?
The trees give an unholy brightness
And cover the earth with rust.
The rain can't be seen
But you can feel it-----
If you are brave enough to leave your fireside.
I haven't really blogged in awhile, it's not that I haven't been ruminating in my journals every night, but I haven't persuaded my fingers and my keyboard to get together.
But being that Halloween has become my favorite holiday, my fingers found the keyboard. For us the Holidays begin with Halloween.
I must give my husband the dubious credit for my becoming a Halloween freak. Before moving here and meeting him, the last time I did anything for Halloween, was when a friend and I were intending to go to a costume party but chickened out, got out of costume, and went somewhere else, leaving my mom to deal with our blind dates. (I'll bet they were pissed!)
When I moved up here, this weird guy still donned a costume each Halloween and went Trick or Liquoring. He was involved with a theater group at the local college where he had access to stage make up and costumes. He was usually a vampire, he would smear on just enough white make up to have a pretty convincing bloodless, dead look andwore a long flowing black cape. To top off the whole effect, he drove a huge 1953 Fleetwood, Cadillac. It was black, and of course, one of those old cars that kinda looked like an inverted bathtub. What girl could have resisted that? Well, anyway I couldn't.
We bought his family home. The house is 130 years old came with more than its share of ghost stories, a ghost seen by all members of his family. It was just a harmless ghost of a young boy who died here, and did stuff like open drawers and knock over snare drums. Every one always thought that when the family moved to the country the little ghost tried to follow them and got lost in the wind. No one has seen the little ghost since then. I actually never had the "pleasure" of seeing the ghost (thank God) It was family history by the time I got here.
If that ghost was going to find its way back to this house, it would have been during the Halloween party era. We tried to start in having little kid parties when or daughter was about six or so, but it turns out the little wuss was so scared of monsters under her bed, that we had to stop with the parties for a couple of years. I guess she was about 10 when we really started going overboard.
Husband always had fond memories of a party his mother threw a party one year for the kids in the neighborhood. I believe the kiddos were called the West Street Maniacs. (Just to clarify.the neighborhood kids in the neighborhood, not his family, were the maniacs. Maybe.) Anyway, she passed around a plate of pealed grapes to blindfolded kids and said they were eyeballs and plate of cold spaghetti was veins.
When our daughter got somewhat over her terrified stage, the fun began. We started preparing for the party in July. We turned the basement of this house into a spook house. We started out with rolls of black plastic, We stapled it to the ceiling, weighted down the ends to the floor so we could make hallways and rooms. He wired up lights so that they were all red for a short time, then all blue. We learned tricks with these colored lights so that things would seem to disappear and reappear. One year he rigged up an ice-cream machine with levers and pulleys which made rubber arms and hands move in circles through as though they had broken through a wall. One of the rooms was always reserved to be bathed in black light with glow in the dark stars and dancing skeletons.
Outside there was a ghostly shaped pinata. We rigged it up so that it came out of our second story bathroom window and slid down on a rope. It was made to look like Slimer from the Ghost Busters movie. The kiddo's would take turns trying to break the thing open with a long handled, plastic ax. Slimer proved to be a tough ghost to crack, being hand crafted from wall paper paste and newspaper.
Then there was the bonfire. With the kids growing some sense, the size of the bonfire grew till it could be seen from space.
Our favorite movie is The Nightmare Before Christmas. Danny Elfman and Tim Burden are geniuses!
Happy Halloween!
