Season of Shadows Blog

Welcome to the fourth installment in my ongoing series designed to help you determine if the Halloween bug’s bitten you a bit too hard. Think of these posts like Cosmo quizzes, only for Halloween lovers, and with fewer references to genitalia.

You know you’re obsessed with Halloween…

…When you’ve actually considered pumping low lying fog throughout your home 365 days per year.

When Rue Morgue and Fangoria magazines start outnumbering Playboy in your “my wife will never find these in the corner of the garage, stuffed behind my toolbox and windshield washer fluid” stash.

When Rue Morge and Fangoria magazines start outnumbering Playgirl in your “my husband will never find these in the bottom drawer of my nightstand, underneath the Crabtree and Evelyn catalogs” stash.

When you’ve found yourself in a heated debate over who’s sexier — Lily Munster or Morticia Addams.

When you’re determined to move to Barrow, Alaska for the winter months just so you can live in perpetual darkness.

When you’re so desperate for a spooky retail fix, you’re willing to visit Party City’s year-round Halloween aisle during summer; even though it’s a shell of its former autumnal self, and is overstocked with five hundred pirate wench costumes no one wanted in October.

When you’ve written at least seventy-five e-mails to Oprah requesting she add Ghoul Friday’s Brains vs. Coffee to her book club list.

When you blanket car windows with flyers announcing your Halloween website at Target store parking lots — in April. (Just a friendly tip: Don’t do this. There’s a guy from Target’s corporate office who’s still sending e-mail rants about my flyer distributing activities.)

When you’ve recorded a huge chunk of Sirius XM’s Halloween programming on your satellite radio receiver and then guard it with your life, not allowing anyone near the device for fear they’ll erase the precious [said in my best Gollum voice].

When you happily encourage neighborhood dogs to bury their soup bones in your front yard, hoping it will add a sense of realism to your graveyard display.

When you’ve found yourself in an even more heated debate over who’s sexier – Spot or Cousin Itt.

When you attend formal social events wearing SkulBone t-shirts.

When you’ve been turned down on more than one occasion by hairdressers concerning your request for the Bride of Frankenstein coif. (If this one applies to you, and you’re a guy, immediately skip the rest of this quiz. You’re officially super obsessed with Halloween — not to mention being quite secure — and, I tip my hat to you!)

When breakfast outings with your family depend on one condition being met: You’ll only go to restaurants serving Count Chocula.

When dinner outings with your family depend on one condition being met: You’ll only go to restaurants offering Haunted Hot Sauce condiments.

When you’ve found yourself in the most heated debate of all over who’s sexiest – Grandpa Munster or Fester Addams.

When your kids finished looking around Spirit Halloween two hours ago and you’ve just barely reached the zombie baby display.

When you start talking to non-haunters about Terror Syndicate, they mistakenly think you’re referring to some new group of guerrilla-type extremists.

When you hate not having doors with creaky hinges in your house.

When you start contemplating sleeping in a toe pincher coffin.

When your smart phone and mp3 players are loaded with endless audio tracks consisting of crunching leaves, whistling wind, cackling witches and ghostly moans.

When you devote an entire greenhouse to growing only pumpkins, solely to be used for jack-o-lantern carving practice throughout the year.

When five-year-old children exhibit more discipline and patience waiting for October 31st to arrive than you.

When you realize you spent more money on glow sticks and stretchy cobwebs last October than you did on filling your car with gasoline last month.

When cleaning up your haunt on November 1st proves to be an emotional experience, thanks to finding that lost piece of trick-or-treater’s candy sitting all alone on the front step.

~~~

As always, if more than three of these apply, you may want to seek help from a qualified haunt specialist. Or, just stay right here at Season of Shadows and we’ll address your obsession together… probably by making it worse.

This fourth installment is dedicated to Pam Morris. Pam was kind enough to present SoS with a blogging award quite a while ago. So I told her I’d dedicate my next You Know You’re Obsessed With Halloween entry to her. If you haven’t done so, please check out her excellent blog.

Related Posts

You Know You’re Obsessed With Halloween
You Know You’re Obsessed With Halloween Part 2
You Know You’re Obsessed With Halloween Part 3

With the SOS haunt going up and coming down in a single day, there’s always a lot of hectic, behind the scenes things occurring. This year was busier and more hectic than years past, so it shouldn’t be too surprising there were even more curious things happening than usual. With that in mind, I thought I’d devote an entry to detailing just a few of these quirky events from Halloween 2010.

Also, most of the following could probably be added to a future You Know You’re Obsessed With Halloween When entry. Let’s face it, you have to be totally obsessed with October 31st and determined to pull off your yard haunt to land firmly astraddle a few of the following hurdles (plus many more) and keep going.

A Gathering of Leaves: Our October was unseasonably warm this year. In fact, we never hit the freezing mark a single night during the entire month. Due to this, almost every tree I encountered was as stubborn as a mule about relinquishing its leaves.

We eventually ended up collecting nine black trash bags full of leaves to spread throughout the display and all but two of the bags were gathered the hard way – by dragging a rake or a stick along tree branch after tree branch, causing each leaf to drop to the ground, one by one. At one point, I even resorted to hand picking leaves from trees.

A Splintery Manicure: I spent all of Halloween night with a splinter, roughly the size of a broken segment of toothpick, stabbing into the delicate skin beneath the fingernail of my left hand’s middle finger. In a hurry, I quickly reached down to pick up a wooden box used in the haunt and greatly miscalculated where to grab it. The force of my hand drove a splinter in the opposite direction deep beneath my nail bed. Ouch!

Since the splinter was wedged tightly between my nail and finger, and it continued driving itself deeper every time I would bump it against something, it was impossible to pull out without a pair of tweezers. The splinter remained under my nail until just around 11:00 pm when I finally had several minutes free to devote to digging it out.

Now I know what the little dude in the Operation board game feels like, eagerly anticipating the tweezed removal of something.

The Muted Sounds of Halloween: It was so busy bringing everything in on time for the display that I totally forgot to setup my CD player. Even worse, I was in such a drained state by the time trick-or-treaters started arriving, I never noticed my favorite Nox Arcana tunes were missing in action. Once I finally realized there was no music playing in the haunt, the night was almost over.

Dust Devil Humor: As the sun quickly made its way lower and lower in the sky, I could feel my back against the wall – there was still much to accomplish and time was no longer on my side. In the midst of this realization, and despite what seemed like the tick, tick, tick of an audible second hand growing ever louder in my head, I was doing my best to create decoratively-horrific cornstalk lean-to’s, otherwise known as shocks throughout the display.

Nature, perhaps sensing my increasing levels of anxiety, decided to get involved. Channeling its wisdom through a gusty breeze, a small dust devil formed right above a shock I had just put the finishing touches on and proceeded to shred it to bits. I like to think of this gesture as a gentle smack to my forehead regarding ways to better prepare for next year, and/or reminding me to quit taking myself so damn seriously in the process.

Mind you, that last sentence is how I look at this event in hindsight. In the moment, however, I was a little too busy to notice nature channeling its wisdom; probably because I was doing some channeling of my own, albeit through a stream of utterances that could never be labeled as wise.

Spewing forth crazy combinations of four-letter words that would have made Redd Foxx and George Carlin proud, I was cussing like a cross between a truck driver, my grandpa and a guy who just got sucker punched in the “grapes” by one of his kids on America’s Funniest Videos!

After my outburst, and with its relatively harmless and somewhat humorous demo job accomplished, the concentrated force of wind dissipated and broke apart as quickly as it had formed, all without affecting anything else in the yard.

A sense of calm restored, I started sounding less like a raunchy nightclub act and more like Linus Van Pelt during his backpedaling repent from uttering the phrase, “If the Great Pumpkin comes.” Mumbling a couple of apologies for my explosive eruption and hoping I had made peace with the gods of Halloween, I quickly went back to work rebuilding the demolished shock.

Light My Fire: Just after dark, the haunt’s almost complete when we realize we’ve yet to light any of the pumpkins or cemetery lanterns. Since we always have a family get together on Halloween and everyone lends a HUGE hand in helping me prep the haunt, my mom took on the task of lighting everything.

About fifteen minutes after agreeing to take charge of the candle lighting, she reemerged from the house, informing us there’s not a match or lighter to be found anywhere; the stoves electric (so we can’t light the candles with it) and the neighbors either weren’t home at that time or they weren’t participating in Halloween whatsoever — porch lights turned off, curtains drawn, etc.

Thankfully, there’s a gas station a couple miles away and my dad was willing to go pick up a lighter for me. A similar situation occurred regarding a cord for my webcam on Halloween night, but I’ll save that story for another time.

These were just a few of the quirky situations and obstacles that presented themselves this year. And while they really weren’t that big of a deal, I wanted to present them in a light that poked a little fun at myself, and hopefully gave you a chuckle in the process.

Of course, when you’re under the pressure of trying to meet the Halloween night deadline, all of these minor things add up. As one thing happens and then another and another, I’m not sure if it’s sleep deprivation or lack of food, or maybe both, but you eventually stop getting frustrated and you actually start laughing amidst all the little glitches and issues.

Halloween day and night prep for the yard haunt is always interesting and there’s never a dull moment to be had. That’s all part of the fun, well that and sticking duct tape to my grandpa’s ass when he’s not looking, until he’s eventually walking around with a giant wad of it stuck to the seat of his pants.