Turkey day weekend

I know 2020 Thanksgiving was supposedly gonna suck because we'd all been asked to socially isolate within our own households and not gather in big groups for the holiday, but I gotta say. I enjoyed myself a lot and I can't remember a more relaxing and chill T-Day 4-day weekend. 

Picture this:

Super easy dinner, it's just the two of you. Instant, canned, and/or frozen-cooks-in-bag fare. Nothing fancy, but decent enough. I mean, as long as there's stuffing and green bean casserole, right? Plus, there's leftovers.

Pickles the cat doin' a THANK

"D'ya eat yet? No? Lemme fix you up a plate."

Then Saturday night Friend night: meta-dinner with the BFF - video chat + virtual sushi dinner in Second Life + real-life sushi delivered + Netflix watch party (Hannibal, for the 2nd time). 

What a time to be alive.

Then, hopping in the car with your partner & chasing around fog til the wee hours in the muffled night, because why the hell not.

 

Then finishing this book, which you finally got around to reading, in the even later hours of the evening, and waking up tearfully and dreaming about Patti Smith & her life all night long, as if she made a psychic visit with you in the dream world.

Then waking up peacefully, and sharing a simple breakfast with coffee & some fancy pastries from a bakery in Seattle that your partner picked up the day before. And lounging around, and eventually making your way to a local park to walk around in the magical sunset mists.

And then, deciding to pick up a few groceries at Fred Meyer so you can come home, make a simple dinner, then watch a movie.

And then, deciding to take a pit stop at the cemetery where your partner's mother is buried, because it just feels like an opportune time and mood to do it.

And watching the foggy sunset over the town below, as Mt. Rainier watches all.

And then the moon rises, and that's something that the mountain & the moon have in common, is that you'll never cease to gasp in wonder whenever you see them. Even if that means you're a sentimental and/or romantic old fool.

* * *

I have very mixed feelings about this holiday - especially this year. But I am still grateful for many things. And I really enjoy winter in the Pacific Northwest and I'm looking forward to it this year.

 

Anaconda

For some reason we watched this last night and it was even more ridiculous than I expected. 

Best part: J-Lo punching Jon Voight in the face, 10/10.

Rest of the movie: 6/10

[ 🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃 _ _ _ _ ]

Sleepy Hollow hearthside vibes

This brief video shows how to make ginger cakes similar to ones that may have appeared in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, as they would have been made in the early 1800s. They sound like the perfect sort of thing to make for autumn and winter holidays. 

Although, you should stay safe and celebrate at home this year with your quarantine companions rather than risk contacting/spreading Covid. Anyway, baking is one of those pandemic hobbies, right? Enjoy!

Spooky story for a rainy day

 Halloween itself may be over, but we're still in the thick of the darker half of the year. Cuddle up with a cozy sweater and a cup of hot coffee and enjoy this ghost story, narrated by the legendary Jackie Torrence.

Halloween 2020 wrap-up

 Well, it wasn't the ideal Halloween, but it certainly wasn't my worst one.

(screencap from "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown")

Where I currently live, I'm already very limited on what I can do, re: decorating & stuff, anyway. We're in a small apartment near busy roads and we don't get trick-or-treaters. My partner likes Halloween, but not to the extent that I do. It's something I tend to revel in, while my partner just kinda goes along for the ride, but wouldn't put any effort into it otherwise.  

Friday night I spent some time with friends back east on a Zoom chat to have a mini long distance Halloween/Samhain party & read Tarot.

On Halloween itself, we had beautiful weather; my partner & I got sandwiches and coffee and went for a walk. 

Stunning foliage in Wright Park, Tacoma WA

The mountain was out!

Other stuff that I did over the weekend:

• Carved a pumpkin
• Roasted pumpkin seeds
• Made a jello-mold brain
• Stared at the full blue moon for a few zillion hours
• Made barm brack bread
• Lit LED candles on my ancestor altar

And that's about it for my Halloween weekend 2020.

I'll still be posting here, tho less frequently during the off-season.

Halloween memories

Things are pretty low-key here this year on the High Holiday, so I'm reminiscing about one of my favorite Halloweens & also one of my favorite costumes ever, the two-headed monster, back in 1995.

 HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

Cabbage Night

 You can tell a lot about a person based on what they call the night before Halloween.

Well - at the very least, you might be able to tell where they might live in the US.

(photo courtesy of Pixabay)

Where I grew up in Connecticut, we called it Cabbage Night, but other regions refer to it as Mischief Night, Devil's Night, Trick Night, Gate Night, and more. It's a night of tricks before the treats -- around the time I grew up, it wouldn't be uncommon to wake up on Halloween morning to see evidence of minor vandalism, like broken pumpkins, toilet-papered trees, and smashed eggs. It's older tradition that is becoming far less common, however.

(photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

You can see an interactive/zoom-able version of the US map with regional terms for it here.

You can read more about the folklore and history behind Cabbage Night here and here.

What do YOU call Halloween eve? 

Halloween ambience

 Are you in need of a little something extra to amp up your Halloween mood? I have compiled a playlist of  80+ autumn, haunted, and Halloween related ambience videos on Youtube.

These would be great as a background for a party, or while carving pumpkins, or whatever! I am always adding to this list as I find new videos, so continue to check back on this playlist.

My favorite haunted attractions - Haunted Happenings in Hartford, CT

 In this post about my favorite Halloween/haunted house attractions, I'm featuring one in my top 3:

Haunted Happenings  in Hartford, CT.

 T H R O W B A C K   T H U R S D A Y

TBH, for me, Haunted Happenings was one of the best things that happened in the 90s.

In the mid-90s, Hartford-area millionaire and philanthropist Arnold Chase got to live every home-haunter's dream - he loved Halloween and had the means to build the haunted attractions of his dreams without limitations. It was a pure labor of love for him. He had done haunts at his own home for about 10 years until the crowds became too large. His first off-home Halloween event that was titled as Haunted Happenings was in an old roller skating rink in East Hartford in October of 1993. 

(I didn't go to that one, so I can't speak to what it was like or how good it was, and internet searching brings up almost nothing about it other than it existed: no pictures, no video, no news articles describing it.)

In October of 1994, also the first year I went, the Haunted Happenings I knew and loved so much was relocated to the former luxury department store G. Fox, an historic 11-storey Art Deco building that was a crown jewel shopping destination for not only Hartford but the entire state. 

As I mentioned above, Chase loved Halloween, had money, and wasn't afraid to spend it. I don't know how much he invested in the attraction, but the entire thing was filled with state-of-the-art animatronics, lighting, special effects, and costuming in an over 100,000 square foot space. Even by today's standards, this shit was amazing. Chase was far and away ahead of his time, and went to conventions like Transworld to find the best effects and people in the industry. He had a Hollywood/theme park caliber attraction in a relatively nowhere location on the east coast. Even today, Haunted Happenings (a name now used by Salem, MA as the title of their general Halloween season events) is ranked as one of the best and most influential haunted attractions to have existed. 

The best and purest creations are the ones done for love and not money, and Haunted Happenings was a prime example. Chase took a personal interest in how the attraction was planned & built, and worked on some of the construction himself, as he had a talent for electronics. He didn't intend to make a profit from his event, instead using the attraction as a fundraiser for the American Diabetes Association, a cause near and dear to him as he and at least one of his children were diabetic. He also was one of the first haunt attractions to also offer a Christmas/holiday themed attraction the Nov/Dec after his Halloween event.

And the love & enthusiasm he poured into Haunted Happenings was obvious in the sheer explosion of attendees that came out to see it. My first time seeing it was in October of 1994, its first year in Hartford. It was early in the month, and my friends and I hardly had to wait in line to get in. Each time we went after that, however, there was a multiple-hour wait. (If only we had the contemporary timed-ticket admission system back then...) And of course, the info about the haunt was all word of mouth, no internet and social media as we know them today. It was just that amazing. 

Here's some of the things I remember most about the experience:

When you arrive, your journey began queuing up outside. As Haunted Happenings got more popular, the line would extend down the whole block and wrap around, so you might be waiting awhile. 

(huge skull hanging on the side of the building's exterior)

Once you make it into the building, you find yourself in a wide open area with massive pillars, the remnants of G. Fox's glory days. It has that odd, eerie feeling of an abandoned building, even though there's a lot of activity bustling around you. Rumors abounded that the building was actually haunted, for real; I could absolutely believe it. When it's finally your turn to enter the haunted house, you're taken down an escalator to a lower floor by your group's tour guide, who remains with you throughout your journey. I don't remember these in the correct order, but some highlights are:

• A "subway" ride with a simulated train - basically, a facade that looks like a subway car, but rocks back & forth to make you feel as though you've gone on a journey
• A mine shaft full of black light with shifting floors and neon glowing orange ceiling supports that moved as though everything was about to collapse on you

• A catacomb with glass floors, showing the restless dead writhing below your feet
• A mad scientist/Dr. Frankenstein-esque character with real Tesla coil, Jacob's Ladder, plasma tubes, and other electric effects, plus realistic monster animatronic
• A cornfield full of scarecrows and animatronic werewolves that would jump at you
• A medieval style torture chamber
• A gory dinner/cooking scene 
• Gas chamber and electric chair execution scenes
• Copious amounts of fog machine fog - ahhh, how I'll always love that scent
• Few, if any licensed characters - everything was original.
• And -- the best ending to a haunted house that I've ever seen. The tour seems to come to an end and your guide brings you to the elevator to bring you back up to ground level. However, once activated, the elevator begins to shake, and the room around you crashes and bangs as though you are plunging down the elevator shaft, the emergency lights are flashing and alarms blaring. Suddenly it stops, and the doors open to reveal a vast red room: you've arrived in HELL with the devil there to greet you. THEN you're finally lead back upstairs, where you can peruse their well-stocked gift and Halloween costume & prop shop before you leave.

There were definitely tons more scenes and details that I'm forgetting, no doubt. Most of our visits there ended in a night of drinks and pub food at the now long-gone Brown Thompson bar & restaurant, which went out about the same year Haunted Happenings did.

Sadly, Haunted Happenings lasted only four years. Halloween 1997 was its last run (also the last of Chase's holiday attractions, too). The city of Hartford had made a deal around that time with a development firm which had plans to renovate the G. Fox building into other businesses. Chase hoped he would eventually be able to continue at another location, but that sadly never came to pass. All of the Haunted Happenings assets were eventually sold at auction. 

Weirdly, a video surfaced last year or so, labeling itself as an auction video, but has (very low res) video that's almost a complete walkthrough of the entire tour - which you can watch below. It also contains TV spots and ads for it at the beginning of the video. Needless to say, I was pretty much beside myself when I first found it - so many great memories.

g fox hartford haunted happenings on Vimeo.

Haunted Happenings gets 10 out of 10 jackos, even tho it took hours to get in.

RIP

[ 🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃🎃 ]

Sources: 

Hauntworld Forums

Hauntworld

Hartford Courant 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

Haunted House Association

Wikipedia - G. Fox & Co.

Halloween jams

 It's less than a week til Thee High Holiday - do you have your Halloween playlist sorted??

Here's a few fun ones by the Slashstreet Boys -- 

Halloween Then & Now challenge

Hey, here's a cool idea I just came up with and you should do it too - especially because it's Flashback Friday time again.

On your social media platform/blog/forum of choice, post two Halloween-themed photos of yourself, with at least ten years between the two. It can interpreted pretty much any way you want: you in costume in different decades, your baby pic vs. adult pic, anything that shows two pics of you that are at least a decade apart in some sort of Halloween context.

I got the idea earlier tonight whilst sorting through photos, and found these two pics of me that are kinda eerily similar, despite the difference in years: 1992 on the left, and 2016 on the right.

(your friend & humble narrator)

Leave me some comments with links if you do it!

Pumpkin scarecrow puppet

Found this guy again last night while taking out some Halloween stuff - a jack o'lantern scarecrow puppet guy. 

Under his robe, he's held up by a plastic stick with 2 levers to press which extend his arms with the long, spindly fingertips.

His face reminds me a lot of Pumpkinrot's jack o'lantern designs but I feel like this predates Rot's work. I *definitely* had this guy before hearing of Pumpkinrot's site because the first time I saw Rot's pumpkin sentinels I immediately thought of this puppet. I wondered for a long time if there was a connection, especially since I found out that Rot had licensed some of his designs in the past. Could just be a coincidence.

I'm can't remember exactly how/where I acquired him. I thought he still had a tag on him, but I was mistaken. I can't remember much about him other than that I'm pretty sure I purchased him at a Media Play in Enfield in the mid to late 90s. I could be wrong about Media Play but I'm pretty solidly sure I did get him in the late 90s. He has no discernable marks or emblems with any sort of company name or date. Anyone recognize him?

 

You Can't Do That on Halloween

I was feeling a little down last night and decided to comfort myself by watching Halloween stuff on Youtube. I searched for "Halloween special" just to see what might be out there and unexpectedly found this - a HALLOWEEN EPISODE of one of my all-time favorites TV shows ever: You Can't Do That on Television, a sketch comedy show for kids/teens. There's so much of it that they could never get away with now for a kid's show, it's really got some pretty dark humor in it that I didn't fully realize when I was younger.

I didn't have cable growing up, so the only time I got to watch this show was when I visited my dad & grandma, if it happened to be on while I was visiting. I was pretty obsessed with it in the late 80s/early 90s and watched all the reruns on during that time. My sense of humor was heavily influenced by YCDToT. 

For a long time I couldn't find video of it online anywhere and it doesn't appear to be available on DVD -- so when I found this clip, which lead to others, I fucking FREAKED OUT. It made my night to find this and honestly it's just as funny as it ever was. So glad I found this, it's now got a prominent place on my Favorite Halloween Specials list.