Friday, November 1, 2024

The Day-After Halloween Pumpkin

Our jack-o-lantern enjoys a warm and dry November 1, after spending Halloween evening lit-up on our front stoop, watching over the bowls of candy (which we leave on the front steps while we're out trick-or-treating). 

For the past several years, my eldest son has requested that we model our jack-o-lantern's face on the title character in Nora S. Unwin's 1953 book Proud Pumpkin, which I highlight in this post

Here are some of that book's excellent illustrations, showing the "round and bold and glorious" jack-o-lantern as it appeared on Halloween, but also as it was subsequently abandoned and allowed to decay in the woodshed:






We brought our jack-o-lantern inside before we went to bed last night, sparing it a soaking from the forecasted rain shower. 

Still, it will inevitably suffer a fate similar to Proud Pumpkin's. Soon we'll take the pumpkin out to a mound of dirt and brush in our woods, and there it will sit until the shell gradually rots and composts itself, becoming part of the mound, as our other pumpkins have done since we moved here.

Thankful for the small measure of light this pumpkin provided, and overall for another joyous Halloween to share with loved ones. See you next year!

Thursday, October 31, 2024

Ghoulash for the Ghouls (1991)

Happy Halloween!

Well, it's finally here. It didn't exactly sneak up on me, but when you have small kids and family priorities, plus work to think about, festivities sometimes take a back seat. We put up some fall decorations indoors, but didn't get out all the ones specifically for Halloween. I'll assemble our harvest figure this afternoon. With other stuff going on earlier in the week, we haven't even carved our pumpkin yet—though we plan to do so after lunch.

However, I dug out a circa 1991 cassette tape recording that my sister and I made—a radio show we wrote and performed, titled "Ghoulash for the Ghouls."

In Scene 1, Dr. Gazinta and Igor try to figure out who (or what) left a large scratch on a piece of glass in the laboratory. Igor tells the doctor that perhaps The Brain did it. This turns out to be a red herring, though, because later—after the pair search the entire house—Igor finally admits to seeing the doctor himself accidentally scratch the glass.

Scene 2 is a sound-effect-heavy description of a woman's terrifying experiences inside a haunted house—though with an unexpectedly happy ending.

Scene 3 is an episode of "Freaky Family Game Show," a Double Dare-type game hosted by a character who sounds like Dracula, and with The Bride and The Mummy as featured contestants.

In Scene 4, The Wolfman observes Dr. Jekyll drinking a potion and transforming into Mr. Hyde. But somehow, this is less of a plot point than the fact that The Brain (the same one from Scene 1?) is growing larger and larger. In a slapped-on ending, the narrator announces: "It did get bigger. And soon it was big enough to conquer the whole world!" A cover version of "Monster Mash" serves as the lengthy outro.

After the recording cuts off, there is a second, though unfinished, episode of "Ghoulash for the Ghouls," written and recorded by my sister and her friend. The short skit describes the experiences of a boy alone in a haunted house. 

The first episode makes a little use of a Halloween tape titled "Horror Sounds of the Night," which I mention in this post, but most of the music and sound effects are from a later cassette, "Monster Mash Party," released by Parade Records in 1988. Here are sides 1 and 2 showing the track listings:



Most of "Monster Mash Party" was later re-released, with a few different tracks, as the 1996 cassette "Shivers! Monster Mash Party," which can be heard here:

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

Party Favors

My sister, brother-in-law, and nephew throw a fabulous Halloween party just about every year, and the one they hosted last Sunday evening was no exception.

Their house—decorated to the hilt with candles, pumpkins, holiday lights, cardboard skeletons and ghosts, and a homemade model of a haunted mansion—was warm, cozy, and inviting. What a joyful time we had talking, laughing, and watching the children, who ranged in age from about 10 months to 10 years.

My nephew had set up a haunted house in the basement, with cobwebs, a skeleton, a ghost, a blacklight, spooky music, and phosphorescent dots all over—thanks to a poked and shaken glow stick. Out in the front yard, stood a cluster of several weathered-looking, styrofoam gravestones.

After bowls of delicious chili for supper, there were treats to eat, such as cake, brownies, and several varieties of candy.

The children took home even more treats. They each got a treat bag that contained a sheet of stickers, two monster fingers, two sets of fangs, a bat ring, a stackable push pencil (familiar to any child of the 1980s), an eraser, a small drawing pad, a glow stick, and a "boo" swirly straw. There were also "popcorn hands" to take—clear plastic gloves filled with popcorn, with a candy corn at each fingertip. Lastly, each child got a small pumpkin, which they could have carved during the party.


Thank you sister, brother-in-law, and nephew for your generosity, and for providing a whole lot of Halloween fun!

(Updated Nov. 4, 2024) 

Monday, October 28, 2024

Halloween Mixtape

Okay, the title is a little misleading. But "mix DVD" doesn't have the same ring.

About 20 years ago, back when DVD burners were still standard computer hardware, I made my own two-disc compilation of some of my favorite Halloween TV episodes. Most of the episodes were ones my family had recorded off television onto VHS, and I converted them to digital video. I should add that this was probably a year or two before YouTube even existed.


The first disc contains full episodes while the second is a mix of full episodes with various Halloween-themed segments from other programs.


Disc 1 (menu music: Theme from Disney's Haunted Mansion)
In its own way, my amateur DVD compilation helped inspire this blog, The Ghosts of Halloweens Past, which I initiated several years later with posts about many of these same programs. I appreciate the low-fi quality to the VHS transfer, and the fact that I can watch these programs on a TV screen and not have to be connected online. Makes the experience a little more old-school, like when mixtapes were a thing.

What would be on your Halloween DVD compilation?

Saturday, October 26, 2024

The Halloween Aisle, Part 2

It's a given that Walmart, Party City, and other big stores are going to have a wider variety of Halloween costumes than your local drug or grocery store will. However, when I was a kid, the drug store was usually our first stop when time came for costume shopping.

I wrote about this last year, in a post about the Halloween aisle of our local Walgreens. While heading out on some errands this morning with my eldest son, I decided to stop by there again, so that he could check out the Halloween aisle for himself.


The offerings were quite similar, particularly in the scarcity of costume items—though I admit that it's late in October and that there may have been more on the racks a month ago. Today there were only two masks: a skull face and an alien. 


There were several different packages of Halloween makeup—tubes of fake blood and creme makeup, oil crayon makeup, and a "Deluxe Makeup Kit" that included various pots and tubes of grease and creme makeup, as well as fake blood, "tooth out" and "fake scar," and several applicators. 


Hanging near the makeup kits were some clothing accessories—witch gloves, a pumpkin beanie, and a few different pairs of Halloween socks. Underneath those were decorations such as light-up jack-o-lanterns and strands of holiday lights, and also some classic-looking jack-o-lantern candy pails.


Other decorations included signs, skeletons, witches, ghosts, spiders, and cobwebs.


Some of the items weren't easily identifiable. I did spot some treat bags—though not the cool paper ones my mom used to get. 


The sweets heavily outweighed the costume and decoration offerings, though marked-up Halloween candy undoubtedly brings the bigger profit. I always enjoy seeing the holiday packaging.






The store had a better—though still slim—selection of costumes last year, but overall, the offerings were about the same. Not great, but certainly better than nothing. Next time, I might try CVS, less than a block away, or the Kroger across the street, to see what they have in stock. 

Friday, October 18, 2024

Disney Wonderful World of Reading: The Haunted House (1975)

Along with the Robert Bright book "Georgie," one of the first books I ever read about a haunted house was one I received around Christmas 1981. It was a Disney read-along book and cassette titled, simply enough, "The Haunted House." 

The story begins as many other haunted house stories do—with travelers driving along a dark country road. When their car runs out of gas, the travelers walk to an old, dilapidated house nearby, hoping someone lives there who can help. ("The Story and Song from the Haunted Mansion" opens with another variation: two travelers are walking home from a dance, when a rain storm, not an empty fuel tank, prompts them to approach the house.)

In this case, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Pluto are the travelers. Through the house's windows, they see lights and shadows inside, and decide to ring the doorbell. 

That's when things get mysterious. The front door opens and immediately slams shut by itself. When the trio enters the house, a portrait hanging in the hall seems to be watching their every move, then whirls around, pulling the trio into a secret passage. Three ghosts appear there, and Mickey, Donald, and Pluto quickly escape through a laundry chute into the basement. Finding some steps that they hope will lead to an exit, they make their way back upstairs, only to encounter bats and a dancing skeleton. However, the bats prove to be fake, and Mickey begins to suspect that someone doesn't want them there and is playing tricks. 

The trio finally learns the truth when they stumble into a room and discover bags filled with money. All the ghostly happenings are the work of three bank robbers, who tie up Donald and Mickey, but aren't able to catch Pluto before he escapes with a bag of money and runs to alert the police.

One fun thing about this storybook: the Fisher Price tape that came with it was blank on side B, so that you could create your own recording.

Other stories where the hauntings are the work of individuals trying to scare away unwanted visitors include "The Haunted House," a 1963 episode of Andy Griffith; the 1966 Don Knotts film The Ghost and Mr. Chicken; and "A Haunting We Will Go," a 1984 episode of Diff'rent Strokes.

Tuesday, September 24, 2024

The Harvest Figure

Fall officially arrived this past Sunday, and though summer heat continues to linger, leaves have begun to carpet our lawn. I'll still be mowing into November, though not as often, and mainly to mulch the leaves. Sometimes, when mowing along the shady, wooded side of our front lawn, I find myself longing for cool October evenings and the rattle of dry leaves on the wind.

When I was young, my parents spent fall evenings in the yard, raking leaves into huge piles, often for us to jump into. As Halloween neared, some of those leaf piles were put to more creative use. Out came a pair of Dad's overalls, one of his worn flannel shirts, a pair old work shoes, and garden gloves. In went handfuls of those crunchy leaves to pad and shape the clothing into a reasonably convincing body. Mom sacrificed a worn pillowcase, which she stuffed with leaves and then drew a jack-o-lantern-style face on the outside. After assembling the upper and lower torso, the hands, feet and head, and positioning the body in a comfortable pose on the back step, the finishing touch was added: one of Dad's ball caps.

A photo from 1981 captures this jolly harvest figure—wearing what appears to be an eye patch—as though he's in the middle of telling a good yarn:

If my memory serves me, that was the last time that we had a harvest figure. At least for a while. The reason? We moved the following year from the Southeast to the West Coast, to a milder climate, and to a house with a smaller yard where relatively few leaves fell in autumn. Of course, you can stuff a harvest figure with other materials, but having a large supply of free leaves sure helps. 

In later years, we made other harvest figures, following a similar pattern. We sometimes used newspaper or old t-shirts for stuffing, though I remember that rolled-up towels were good for filling pant legs and shirt sleeves, because they left fewer lumps than wads of newspaper did. Here is our figure from 1998, pre-staged in our living room:


My siblings and I got older and took the job over from our parents, and our displays eventually got a little more elaborate. Instead of just propping the figure up on the front porch, we set him up behind our parents' bedroom window, which looked out on the walkway up to the front door. I had a plaster cast of my face that I had made in a college class, and we put that in a basket and used it as the "head" of our headless figure. 



With the addition of a black light and a Halloween sounds CD, the finished display was quite effective, shown in this 2004 photo:

One year, I put on some spooky makeup and hid just inside the front door, spying through the peephole to see when trick-or-treaters arrived. An older kid—probably middle-school age—walked up by himself, noticed the headless figure in the window, and approached the door. Before he could knock, I suddenly swung the door open and said, "Boo!" or something like that. The startled kid responded with an expletive. I chuckled, and offered a lighthearted apology along with some candy. But the kid, deflated, walked away without taking a single piece. I toned it down after that.

About 15 years ago, I moved back to the Southeast, to the region of my birth. I'm now a father of two boys. For the past two Halloweens, I have made harvest figures the way my parents used to—raking the yard and then stuffing handfuls of leaves into old clothes. Here's how our figure looked in 2022:

Last year, about a week before Halloween, I stuffed the clothes and head and then stored them in plastic tubs until October 31. Unfortunately, I completely forgot about the harvest figure until my wife, sons, and I were heading out the door that evening to trick-or-treat. At that point, I had to say "Oh well." I left all of the figure's parts in those plastic tubs for most of a year. And there they'll remain over the next month, until we assemble them on Halloween!