October is a busy month for us. So busy in fact that sleep and sanity are often sacrificed. However, we love Halloween too much to abandon all of our favorite seasonal activities in the name of party planning. Hence, this October we made sure we still got to experience some of the screams and silliness of our preferred holiday. Here’s a synopsis of those shrieks.
Jason and I attended the Witches’ Ball at This Is The Place. It’s essentially just a costumed dance party but we had a lot of fun jiving in peculiar attire and plan on attending again next year.
As has been our custom for a number of years, we spent on evening getting startled and lost at Cornbelly’s with a group of our buddies. This outing involved wandering through mazes of both the corny and the scary variety. Romping around in shadowy fields with friends and chainsaw guys is always amusing.
And who says aerobic exercise is only for the breathing? Jason and I, along with Jason’s dad Keith, ran the Night of the Running Dead this October. Are you livingly challenged? Do you crave a tasty brainiac on occasion or enjoy scurrying for your life? If your answer to any of those questions was yes then NOTRD just might be the race for you. Both humans and zombies may enter. The humans get a modest head start and then the trackside snacking begins. Jason and I, per our rotting flesh, ran with the zombies. That’s no bombshell but it may shock you to hear that Jason, Keith, and I all won first place in our respective age divisions. How did we manage? Some things are better left buried.
Jason and I also hit a couple of other Halloween hangouts. We toured the Haunted Village at This Is The Place and explored Evermore’s Pumpkin Fest. What did these hair-raising parks have to offer? At the Haunted Village you wander through the night from one tiny building to another. These structures, historic replicas, are effortlessly eerie but they leave much to the imagination…and my imagination has a big imagination. Evermore also has a different spin on spooky. Its ghostly landscape is very interactive and guests can go on quests through sinister graveyards and forsaken temples. I’d recommend checking both of these places out.
Every year, Jason and I look forward to our Halloween dinner. The two of us spend an evening preparing a meal full of fall shapes and flavors. This time those morsels were broccoli-cheese soup, cheese puffs disguised as pumpkins, and popcorn balls. All three of these recipes turned out great so we were more than happy eating their leftovers for days.
Decorating our house for our party wasn’t my only design task this October. The company I work for encourages each department to spruce up their area of the building for Halloween and gives them a small amount of cash to do so. I was nominated by my team to head up our bedecking. (Gee, I wonder why.) After much debate, we decided that Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban would be our theme. I’m pretty proud of what we created on a little budget. House banners colored our ceilings. Dementors drifted above our stairs. Sirius Black posters, cleverly photoshopped with one of my teammates’ faces, covered our walls while hand-painted Patronuses protected them. A cauldron, jars of potion ingredients, wands, and the Marauder’s Map were at the ready, waiting for the magic to begin. I dressed as Hermione and even wore a Time-Turner. One of my coworkers, the poster child, came as Sirius Black.
Speaking of decorating, Jason and I discovered recently that the kids in our neighborhood call our home “The Halloween House.” This name was bestowed upon it because, in the words of one child, we “always have the best decorations and the best candy.” I can never give out just one treat to each of the roughly 125 youngsters that come a knocking every year. So this time, instead of providing handfuls of snack size sweets to every kid, I offered full size candy bars and giant Pixy Stix. Surprisingly, the Pixy Stix were vastly more popular than the candy bars. According to a preliminary survey, this was because they contain a greater quantity of sugar. And who says kids don’t understand economics.
That brings me to the end of our seasonal adventures. We brewed, we screamed, we crawled through fields of corn. October was hectic but we still stopped to smell the rotting corpses.