...speaking of "the spirit of october"....

....call me cheesy, but I love halloween! love it, love it, love it! . Next to the carnival season at mardi gras, its probably the only holiday me and my family put any effort into celebrating at all when I was growing up...and we put a lot of effort into both of those two. I still do, even as an adult. Anybody else with me on that? What are some ways you set the proper eerie/harvest/masquerade mood through out the season? Music, Movies, Foods, Decorations, etc. Here are some of my favorite things:

-The Disney animated version of The Legend of Sleepy Hallow

-The Orginal versions of The Haunting, Night of the Living Dead, and Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages

-I play the mandolin. Me and some of these hippies I went to high school get together and jam on old timey New Egland folk songs the last week in october. (I get really geeky when it comes to this stuff )

-"The Danse Mabre" .

-The Misfits

-I make this aromatic tea out of cinnamon and orange peels, and let the steam seep through our living room.

-I always go back home and decorate my parents yard up to give a real 'haunted mansion' type vibe. The little kids in the neiborhood love it.

-Various documetaries on the history of halloween made by the history channel and PBS and such

-I always make an effort to go any churches that have 'anti-halloween' meetings and antitagonize the shit out of the people their.

-I read the story "Young Goodman Brown" various sections of The Crucible, and various historical accounts of the salem witch trials.

-Doing grave rubbings is fun, and/or photographing old cemetaries is fun.

-Read Various sections of Antone Lavey's The Satanic Bible

-Weird gothic sex rituals w/your partner on halloween night are on halloween night, too...

what about you?

I love to watch the great pumpkin charlie brown and nightmare before christmas.

This year is my daughter's first halloween, and I'm looking forward to taking her out. yay!!!

those holloween cartoons are a must for any real halloween, and how can we be leaving garfields holloween out?? screamers in toronto used to be cool too, but now its being made more and more for kids (screamers is a place with a bunch of haunted houses, terot and palm readers, arcades, mazes... stuff like that).

I love murdering the goddamn kids who try to egg my house and burying their bones in the crawlspace underneath.

Oh, you said Halloween, not Christmas! Boy, do I feel stupid!