Dogwood's Diary - Halloween Edition

[dogwoodmaple 380]

My family and I are big Halloween celebrators and this year was no different.  We started early this year and had all of our exterior decorations up by the first week of October, complete with human-sized spiders, webs, and a ghoulish zombie cemetery.  We take a lot of pride in our decorations and definitely go all out to get into the spooky spirit.  The whole process starts the biggest ladder we could find, because the spiders go from the ground up to and on the roof.  The most difficult thing was how to get the spider webs everywhere without having to put them all up by hand because that's just too much effort.  Luckily this year I solved that problem with some homemade engineering.  I was able to connect a long large-diameter hose to my leaf blowers and I simply fed the spider webs into the tube and started spraying them all over the front of our house.  Luckily brick is a great medium for fake spider webs so the entire process worked like a charm.  When it comes to the ghoulish zombie cemetery, the name of the game is definitely "weathered".  You don't want the tombstones to look too new and they have to have that worn in, spooky, old feel to them.  We make sure to add some moss, scrapes and scratches, and some other things to each tombstone to make sure it has the appropriate feel.  We've got graves for Dracula, Frankenstein, various zombies, and even the Wolf-Man.  To finish off this cornucopia of spookiness, we add a couple of fog machines, an eerie soundtrack that we play on wireless speakers, and some orange and purple Halloween lights.  The lights start in our front bushes, wrap up around the porch and front door, and light the way over to the cemetery.  When it was all said and done, it definitely stands out as one of the spookier houses in the neighborhood.

 

Next, it's all about the Halloween party that we throw for our friends, family, and neighbors.  The party itself usually rotates between a handful of houses and this year it was our turn, which is one of the reasons why we got a big jump on getting the decorations up so early.  We of course have plenty of Halloween themed cocktails, from Bloody Bloody Marys and Slimy Gin and Tonics, to Brain Jello Shots and Bone Beer.  There's also a costume judging element with the winner taking hold of the annual trophy which they get to keep for the next 365 days and rotates among the winners.  For food, we stick to spooky season and have a meatloaf formed into the shape of a zombie torso, strawberry shortcakes that look like cups of flesh and blood, as well as pizza which we dress up as spookily as we can.

 

Luckily, many of my Vancouver teammates were able to make the party this season which was really fun.  It was nice to take some time off the ice to hang out with everybody and it certainly seemed like everyone had a lot of fun. I'm trying to get Frank to host the party next season, but he might need some more convincing!

 

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Edited November 7, 2022 by dogwoodmaple