11/14/2007
Dream Into Action
For years, I’ve had this vision enter my head when October comes around. It’s a set of jack o’ lanterns carved to look like a string of shrunken heads hanging in some voodoo priest’s workshop (or perhaps a cheesy New Orleans pub). Heck, I even took the time to draw up a schematic one year.
I’m sure this is culturally insensitive. My bad.
There were a couple of problems with bringing this concept to fabrication. First and foremost, the old house sucked ass when it came to trick-or-treaters. I never got any, and that did a lot to kill the momentum on any decorate-the-pad-for-Halloween initiative.
Second, I’m kind of low-effort as far as Halloween observance goes, especially for a JesusH-er. I did go so far as to dress up as Ron Mexico for Halloween last year, but even that pales in comparison to a real JesusH costume effort.
This year, though, we’re finally in a Halloween-y neighborhood, the energy level’s never been higher, and the wife had never carved a pumpkin, so after converting pennies into money we blew a couple of hours turning three pumpkins into the real thing.
Not so scary in the daytime…
…but night’s another story.
We ended up cutting the access holes in the back of the pumpkins, rather than cutting the crowns off, and had to use the little battery-powered fake candles from the centerpiece we stole from Paul and Jen’s reception instead of the real thing so the whole works didn’t catch on fire. The hair was black bootlaces strung through holes on the top of the pumpkins to broken chopstick supports in the bottoms.
I cut the bottom jack to match what I had in mind, but it had been so long since I did one of these I wasn’t sure it’d show enough light, so I carved the middle pumpkin a little more conventionally. The top pumpkin is Michelle’s first jack o’ lantern. He’s bringing happy back.
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Very nice. So how many trick-or-treaters did you get this year? I remember trick-or-treating until 8:30 easily when I was younger. When did you get your last visitor?
Comment by woody — 11/15/2007 @ 6:46 pm
Should have been more than last year across the board. The candy industry lobbied for years to have DST extended one week. This year they finally got it.
Comment by Andres — 11/16/2007 @ 9:22 am
It was more than last year by a large margin, but I was in a neighborhood where there were no trick-or-treaters last year.
We got dozens. The latest kids came by were some suspiciously aged, half-assedly costumed teens after 9:00pm (if I remember correctly), but I don’t think they really count. The latest legit trick-or-treaters probably arrived at 8:45 or so.
The best was when Michelle gave a little kid some candy, and they took it, dropped it in their plastic candy-holding pumpkin, and took another piece of candy out to give Michelle in exchange. It was totally cute.
Comment by Dave — 11/16/2007 @ 9:56 am
That is really cute. I remember when I was working at the library I was checking out books to a little kid, probably about 6. When I handed him back his books he looked at me with an earnestness I’m not use to from kids, said “I promise to bring these books back”, and extended his fist with his pinkie out. I didn’t understand what was happening for a couple seconds but then it became clear what I needed to do next. I extending my hand and cemented my only pact by way of pinkie promise.
Comment by woody — 11/16/2007 @ 1:29 pm