Karin and I spent this past weekend decorating the house for Halloween, and are busy putting together the menu for our yearly party this coming Saturday. We have the Val Lewton movies queued up to play silently as our background music fills the house, cigars have been purchased, alcoholic beverages are chilling and ready to be served, the lighting effects are set up, and the dry ice is sitting at the ready in the freezer. The front porch is decked out in an eerie spider motif, and the inside of the house looks like an abandoned haunted house replete with spider webs, black roses, skulls, skeletons, and a laser light show…
…don’t all abandoned haunted houses have lasers?
In short, we’re ready to rock this coming weekend!
As the seasons start to change and the weather slowly cools, certain unmistakable events begin to unfold. Like clockwork they manifest themselves and usher in the upcoming holidays, and without these hallmarks the upcoming holidays would seem a bit diminished.
As Thanksgiving nears one lucky turkey is pardoned by the President, the smell of pumpkin pies grows thick in the air, one actually begins to look forward to eating jellied cranberries straight from the tin, and my sister in San Francisco has her annual psychotic breakdown.
Christmas is bookmarked with freshly cut pine trees, hot toddies, houses decorated with lights, and my sister calling me at two in the morning asking what she should get mom and dad this year to make up for being such a disappointment to them.
And you can be sure that Halloween is just around the corner when you begin to see this on the store shelves:
And curse my luck that Count Chocula was sold out…
It’s finally October!
I don’t know about you, but Halloween is my favorite unofficial “holiday”. At no other time of the year do we purposely rub shoulders with creepy crawlies and things that go bump in the night. Homes are transformed into decrepit haunts, and familiar family-friendly venues become welcome abodes to all manner of skulking spirit and grotesque ghoulie. Celebration of the dead and dying is encouraged, and praise for all things surreal and bizarre is not only tolerated but expected.
Hanging the spider webs, firing up the smoke machine, arranging the eerie lighting, carving the pumpkins, dressing up the baby in a ridiculous costume, playing the appropriate mood music and handing out candy. Now that’s a holiday I can get behind.
I swear, if I was young again you can bet you’d find me trawling the neighborhood on Halloween night intent on staying out until my pillowcase was filled with candy.
You can keep your Christmas trees, Easter bunnies, Thanksgiving turkeys and President’s Day presidents. Give me an awesome costume and a grip of candy on October 31st and I’ll be more than content for the rest of the year.
For the second time in as many years the Easter Bunny has paid us a visit. Apparently suffering from either mange or a terrible case of dandruff, he left a bunny trail wherever he went:
If you look really closely at this pic, you’ll see the remains of a carrot lying in the middle of the street (look for a tiny bit of orange).
Opening our front door we were greeted with a nifty little surprise:
Right on. Free candy! Thank you Easter Bunny.
Clipping from a newspaper, circa 1920:
I find this interesting because Mt. Rubidoux is just a few miles (give or take) from my house. It’s a place I’ve driven past many, many times. I always knew that Easter services were popular, but I wasn’t aware how far back this yearly ritual went. Imagine trying to make your way down this bumpy one-way mountain road in your Model ‘T’ after the sunrise services.
Another interesting thing I discovered while researching this clipping is that Wikipedia has this photo on their Mt. Rubidoux Wiki site. Comparing the cars in the Wiki photo with this newspaper clipping, it became apparent that, if Wikipedia has their dates correct then my newspaper photo is actually from 1913.
Would anybody out there with an affinity for automobiles be able to pinpoint the date from which this photo was actually taken? Call me curious…
