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Celebrating One Year of Revival!
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Spooky plans?
- Thread starter Gloom-is-good
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My spooky story:
My mom really loves Halloween. She always gets super decked out as a witch every year. She also dresses up as a fortune teller and tells fortunes at the local elementary school. I was born Oct 30. When she took my brothers trick or treating the next day, they took me along in a hand basket. No one knew she was pregnant (small town) so she gave everyone a spooky surprise!
Then I had to go back to the hospital because premature lol. And that's the story of my first trick or treat! 
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We're picking up a dog on Halloween and then becoming full time pet owners for the first time ever. That's it spooky.
We'll be making sure she doesn't try to run outside while we're giving out candy to the kids that come by.
At my old job we used to do Halloween parties with prizes for costumes and stuff. Just before one of them they switched out the trash barrels at all the desks with these things called Trash Buddies (regular desk sizes recycling bin with a tiny ass trash bin that hangs on the side of it). We grabbed ones from empty desks that were clean and strapped the recycling bin to our backs and trash over our shoulders in the front and were "The Trash Buddies." Got honorable mention in the costume contest because people thought it was hilarious...well everyone but the people who were running the contest, because they were the people who also recently just got all of those set up. They did find it funny that everyone just started using the bins strapped to us for their empty drink bottles though.
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Always with an attention to detail… even got the tiny hands for him right.
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Every kid in Western Canada knows to get their costume a size up because there's a good chance you need to stuff your winter jacket inside it
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That’s not a bad idea
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My daughters are being a 50s style girl with a poodle dress and the other is being a light/dark fairy or something. Both are more excited that they bought colored hair spray.
I bought a cheap cloak/robe in black and have set my lightsaber to red and will be jump scaring kids as we trick or treat and am considering bringing my other lightsaber set to green/good and letting anyone battle and kill me in the street.
I bought a cheap cloak/robe in black and have set my lightsaber to red and will be jump scaring kids as we trick or treat and am considering bringing my other lightsaber set to green/good and letting anyone battle and kill me in the street.
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I love this story and you are bday twins with my husband so now I will always know your bday tooMy spooky story:
My mom really loves Halloween. She always gets super decked out as a witch every year. She also dresses up as a fortune teller and tells fortunes at the local elementary school. I was born Oct 30. When she took my brothers trick or treating the next day, they took me along in a hand basket. No one knew she was pregnant (small town) so she gave everyone a spooky surprise!
What's your pup's name going to be? We adopted one of our cats on Halloween!
Last year we were Wednesday and Uncle Fester! Yes kinda weird but Morticia and Gomez were taken
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Ha, what a coincidence! It's a great birthday though, Halloween birthday parties rule. Plus, candy.
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Her name will be Somer (pronounced like summer)!
My wife and I first moved in together in Somerville, where we just moved away from when we bought our house (one city over). So it's in honor of that. The people there are Somervillains, so she's going to be Somer, the Villain.
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I’m pretty sure my uncle used to, and possibly still does, live in Somerville
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It's a nice place to live. If not for how expensive it is to buy there we'd still be there.
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I've been sick the last few days, so I probably won't be doing anything this year.
One year, I had just moved into the neighborhood, and I bought waaay too much candy. Once things got slow, I took my leftover candy and reverse trick or treated. It was a fun way to get to know my neighbors who were into Halloween, although I managed to end up with more candy than I started with, so that part kinda backfired.
Another year, I set up a Minecraft themed display in my garage. I got a bunch of those cube cardboard boxes from Home Depot and painted them to look like different blocks, including some redstone that lit up. There was a creeper and a skeleton and a giant spider. I was dressed up as a skeleton holding the candy bowl at the end of the "cave". My favorite part was how the little kids would start bawling, then I'd tip the candy bowl towards them so they could see the contents, and they'd immediately stop crying and run over to me.
It rained two inches on Halloween that year, so I was afraid nobody would be out, but I got huge crowds. I'm sure partly it was popular because it was somewhat indoors and therefore warmish and dry, but several groups said they heard about my house from their friends and went out of their way to come check it out. It was a lot of fun.
Kids are apparently willing to face adversity for fistfuls of free candy. I NEVER would've gone anywhere in that rain. I went outside for a couple minutes to try to make the torrent of water in front of my house traversible, and I was completely soaked afterwards.
One year, I had just moved into the neighborhood, and I bought waaay too much candy. Once things got slow, I took my leftover candy and reverse trick or treated. It was a fun way to get to know my neighbors who were into Halloween, although I managed to end up with more candy than I started with, so that part kinda backfired.
Another year, I set up a Minecraft themed display in my garage. I got a bunch of those cube cardboard boxes from Home Depot and painted them to look like different blocks, including some redstone that lit up. There was a creeper and a skeleton and a giant spider. I was dressed up as a skeleton holding the candy bowl at the end of the "cave". My favorite part was how the little kids would start bawling, then I'd tip the candy bowl towards them so they could see the contents, and they'd immediately stop crying and run over to me.
It rained two inches on Halloween that year, so I was afraid nobody would be out, but I got huge crowds. I'm sure partly it was popular because it was somewhat indoors and therefore warmish and dry, but several groups said they heard about my house from their friends and went out of their way to come check it out. It was a lot of fun.
Kids are apparently willing to face adversity for fistfuls of free candy. I NEVER would've gone anywhere in that rain. I went outside for a couple minutes to try to make the torrent of water in front of my house traversible, and I was completely soaked afterwards.
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When I was a kid, my family would put on a display in our garage every year. Here are a few highlights off the top of my head:
We'd always have a plastic sheet or similar dividing the display area and the "private" area of the garage where the door to the house was. One year a drunk neighbor wandered over and was chatting with me in the garage. We happened to be standing right in front of the sheet, and my mom happened to be on the other side, so she grabbed the neighbor around the waist through the sheet. The neighbor went running down the driveway at top speed, screaming bloody murder, right past a big group of teenagers walking up. They all stopped and watched her run past and looked at each other uncertainly, all the typical teenage bravado suddenly gone.
One year, we made a wooden coffin (don't do this, they're sooo heavy), and my sister would lay in it with the lid closed. As people walked past, she'd scratch on the lid. Usually someone in the group would get the courage to open it, and she'd lay there motionless. People would inevitably lean closer to try to tell if she was a real person or a prop, and that's when she'd lunge up at them. It invariably scared the bejesus out of people. (My sister really enjoyed laying in the closed coffin. Said it was comfy.)
Usually half of the garage was dedicated to a winding hallway with jump scares and whatnot, then it dumped you into an open area with some stuff on display and the candy. Once we had a table with a ouija board on top, and the planchette for it would move in response to questions. We accomplished this by putting a magnet in it, then putting a rod inside the table surface which poked through the back into a hidden room on the hallway side. I sat in the room and looked through a tiny hole and moved the planchette around with the rod. It blew people's minds because you could pick up the planchette and it looked normal, and you could look under the table and nothing was there. Nobody ever figured it out because it just looked like a normal table up against a wall, like most of the decorations in there were due to the obviously limited space
We gave out glow sticks in addition to candy (try it sometime, kids go bananas over them), and most kids wanted a specific color. We started out honoring requests, but blue was by far the most popular, and we quickly ran low. One older kid came up to my dad and me and said, "can I get a blue one? Blue ones are the tightest!!!" My dad looked him in the eyes and said seriously, "I'll give it to you if you cluck like a chicken." The kid was quiet for a moment then wordlessly took whatever color was offered. Now whenever anybody wants a blue anything, I say to my dad "blue ones are the tightest!!" and he responds, "cluck like a chicken?"
Good times. Unfortunately, my current neighborhood doesn't really get into Halloween and there aren't many kids.
We'd always have a plastic sheet or similar dividing the display area and the "private" area of the garage where the door to the house was. One year a drunk neighbor wandered over and was chatting with me in the garage. We happened to be standing right in front of the sheet, and my mom happened to be on the other side, so she grabbed the neighbor around the waist through the sheet. The neighbor went running down the driveway at top speed, screaming bloody murder, right past a big group of teenagers walking up. They all stopped and watched her run past and looked at each other uncertainly, all the typical teenage bravado suddenly gone.
One year, we made a wooden coffin (don't do this, they're sooo heavy), and my sister would lay in it with the lid closed. As people walked past, she'd scratch on the lid. Usually someone in the group would get the courage to open it, and she'd lay there motionless. People would inevitably lean closer to try to tell if she was a real person or a prop, and that's when she'd lunge up at them. It invariably scared the bejesus out of people. (My sister really enjoyed laying in the closed coffin. Said it was comfy.)
Usually half of the garage was dedicated to a winding hallway with jump scares and whatnot, then it dumped you into an open area with some stuff on display and the candy. Once we had a table with a ouija board on top, and the planchette for it would move in response to questions. We accomplished this by putting a magnet in it, then putting a rod inside the table surface which poked through the back into a hidden room on the hallway side. I sat in the room and looked through a tiny hole and moved the planchette around with the rod. It blew people's minds because you could pick up the planchette and it looked normal, and you could look under the table and nothing was there. Nobody ever figured it out because it just looked like a normal table up against a wall, like most of the decorations in there were due to the obviously limited space
We gave out glow sticks in addition to candy (try it sometime, kids go bananas over them), and most kids wanted a specific color. We started out honoring requests, but blue was by far the most popular, and we quickly ran low. One older kid came up to my dad and me and said, "can I get a blue one? Blue ones are the tightest!!!" My dad looked him in the eyes and said seriously, "I'll give it to you if you cluck like a chicken." The kid was quiet for a moment then wordlessly took whatever color was offered. Now whenever anybody wants a blue anything, I say to my dad "blue ones are the tightest!!" and he responds, "cluck like a chicken?"
Good times. Unfortunately, my current neighborhood doesn't really get into Halloween and there aren't many kids.
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Funnily enough, I hated it as a kid, but looking back I'm glad for the memories.
I did take some pictures, but they're not on this phone. I'll have to see if I can find them.
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That's most things I find. Things my parents forced me to do but which I hated in the moment, I now look back on fondly.
They still made some really dumb decisions (forcing me to start tap-dancing lessons at age 13 wtf) but overall I'm appreciative of how good they were as parents