El-Jay Communities
Halloween Decorating
Leaf Photos and various Autumn-flavored Goodness
Spooky Style
Lovecraft. ♥

Halloween Games and Media
Halloween Hangman
Flash Pumpkin Carving Game!
In case anyone wanted to know what Halloween on Oahu is like. Except even more fail.
Creepy flash animations, apparently best viewed between the hours of 3 and 4 AM
99 Rooms- Amazing interactive graffiti art
Hospital Website: looks normal at first, but click around for a while...
Hands-down scariest Halloween display ever.
Cthulhu lolcats. pft.
Falling Skeleton. I. May have spent way too much time looking at this.
Urban Dead, the zombie apocalypse game!
Spooky Scary Skeletons (Newgrounds)
13 Halloween Tips (Newgrounds)

Halloween Meta
Interesting Take on Why Halloween is important to our Society
Snopes on Halloween Urban Legends
Anything and Everything you could possibly want to know about/How-to for Halloween
Sound Costuming Advice
Another Halloween Blogger in August! Check out the Halloween Countdowns for years past
A year-long Halloween blogger

My Halloween Stuff
My Halloween-Videos Collection post
Autumn Goddess Triptych
Halloween Recipies
Reasons to Love Halloween
All of my other Halloween-related Posts

Stuff to do on Halloween
Haunted House/Haunted Hayride/Halloween Attraction finding site, nationwide
Halloween Party Games
Traditional American Ghost Stories, suitable for a variety of ages
Ghosting or Booing (essentially the same activity)
Knott's Scary Farm

A Halloween How-To: Costumes, Parties, Decorations, and Destinations, by Lesley Pratt Bannatyne

So, a lot of the halloween books you can get are sort of cutesy, Country Living-esq, "harlequin bunnies with black and orange eggs!!!" sorts of things. Most are directed at either your grandmom or at soccer mom activities for four-to-five year old kids. But! Hope springs eternal, and this book--despite the cover art that looks like it was done by a third grader-- certainly fulfills it.

Bannatyne manages an honestly charming style of prose, personal without being saccarine, and with a hearty dose of misanthropy that goes a long way towards tempering her very apparent enthusiasm for the entire holiday. "But things have changed," she writes. "Now kids have a lot more power in general, and the real reversal at work is that adults, for once, are free to terrorize them. And they do. Each October, fully-grown men and women unpack their Styrofoam gargoyles and sigh, savoring last year's memories of trick-or-treaters running shrieking into the night."

The book contains a really astonishing amount of useful content, as well---especially compared to most books in the genre which tend to be picture heavy and content thin. The chapter on decorations has some good tricks, though the way they're applied is a bit on the cheesy side. Many of them could be converted easily by someone with artistic sense but little construction skills into some really terrifying effects. The section on pumpkins--carving, decorating, painting, photographing, etc. is sparse but entertaining. The costumes were embarrassing, the only chapter I'd recommend skimming or skipping entirely. The chapter on parties was really cool; the section on the victorian halloween theme was particularly interesting for the look at historical ways they celebrated the event (and also for the easy introduction of steampunk elements, which some of you might recall from my last post I have a soft spot a mile wide for). The recipes chapter was somewhat short, but had a number of really yummy-sounding dishes.

But all of that is pretty standard fare. What really makes the Halloween How-To shine is the second half of the book, I'd say buy it just for chapter seven on, even without all the goodies from the first half. Chapter seven gives us a list of halloween events throughout America, from the Salem Haunted Happenings weekend to Halloween at the Castro. There's also sections on haunted hotels, hayrides, cemeteries, and theme parks. I hate cars, and chapter seven leaves me itching to organize a road trip. <3

Chapter eight is a list of halloween myths and urban legends, such as the supposed black cat satanic sacrifices and the razors in the candy myth. Paired with Chapter ten, on current trends in halloween, they give a really interesting look at where the holiday is going in our times. There's talk of the increasing commercialization, the community aspect, the spiritual side of the holiday, and a look at some of the bible-thumping HellHouse running panties-in-a-wad extremists who yearly crusade against the idea of the holiday in the first place.

Altogether a really fun, informative read. I'd highly recommend the Halloween How-To to anyone with an interest in the subject, and especially to those with an academic interest in Halloween.

This is the coolest thing I have ever seen. <3



Read about it here.

I love looking at this stuff off-season. It's so cheap! <3

Terry's village has a set of embarrassingly dorky bathroom stuff:
Jack o'lantern shower curtain hooks, shower curtain, absurd tp holder, and a toothbrush holder/soap dish/towel hook that come together.




Also from Terry's village, this Resin Pumpkin Halloween Train


and this Candy Corn Suncatcher

1. I may be too old to trick-or-treat and old enough to buy my own, but seriously? Free candy gets the #1 spot. Who doesn't love a holiday where small children are randomly given candy for being out late at night threatening their elders? A+

2.It's a time when the whole community collectively expresses an interest in the fantastic and the macabre, and such an interest isn't stigmatized. It's fun to suddenly be in the majority.

3.It's, ironically enough, one of the times I most enjoy being an American, with its focus on traditional American folklore, myths, and customs, without the baggage of violence or persecution of native peoples that attend the fourth of july and thanksgiving.

4.It provides an opportunity to practice traditional crafts, like sewing for costumes or cooking pumpkin pies or scarecrow-making, which usually get ignored in our society.

5.Costumes. Allowing people to try on a different persona and act outside their usual social boundaries without facing trouble or negative assessments because of it. Adults could stand to play a little more.

6.Costumes. Encouraging a little more sex-positivism (which gods know our country could use) without alienating those who don't feel comfortable/don't want to engage in that kind of celebration.

7. I love that we have a holiday that revolves around admitting to, facing, and overcoming the things that scare you. We, as americans, do enough head-in-the-sand-ing. Halloween teaches children and reminds adults to be brave- not by pretending we're not scared or whatever we're afraid of isn't there, but by facing it, accepting it, and moving past it.

8. It evokes a sense of the wider community that no other holiday manages. Because Halloween isn't just celebrated with your friends or your family or whatever, it actively involves everyone in the neighborhood/town through trick-or-treating and parades and what-not, it helps build bonds between people who might not otherwise have any reason to ever interact. In a society that's rapidly fragmenting into smaller and smaller units the way ours is? That's beyond price.

9. People decorate almost as much for Halloween as they do for Christmas. Don't tell me you don't love seeing otherwise perfectly respectable neighbors putting up spiderwebs and witches and tombstones and stuff up in their yards. These are the same dudes who look at you funny when you haven't cut the grass in a few weeks the whole rest of the year and suddenly they want their house to look like Freddy Kruger's. That's hilarious, I'm sorry.

10.Pumpkin is delicious.

Why do you guys like halloween?