Halloween Hangover

Halloween has come and gone, but like a Minnesota goodbye, I'm dragging the season out as long as possible. I finally got the last string of orange lights in the box and stowed in the attic this week. Remarkably, tearing down the decorations took a lot less time than the two weeks it took to properly haunt our front yard.

So here is the official recap of our most favorite holiday.

Our Halloween spirit got an early start with a cookie bake with the kids at the end of September. I waited a full week into October before hauling out the boxes and chests and cauldrons of happy horror. Here is a picture of our house mostly spookified. I had a few more bats and cobwebs to add before the big night. You can click on the picture to enlarge it if you dare.

I rigged the owl on the left to have light up orange eyes to match the orange flame bulbs around the archway.

I, once again, unearthed a forgotten cemetery under our gallows tree. I put the same orange lights hanging loosely from the tree and added a black pumpkin with green lighted face.

Last year's scarecrow flew into town on his broom just in time.

And then the windstorm hit. We had two days of wind gusts up to 60mph.Poor Jack Scarecrow's post snapped in two.

Even cute little Spidey-poo got tipped over.

But don't worry, this story has a happy ending. The Great Pumpkin came through on the day before All Hallow's Eve and set everything right.

Now just a note about our pumpkins to wrap things up. I did a few new things with this year's jack-o-lanterns. I decided to put a string of purple lights in two of our larger pumpkins and have them flash on and off. It really worked great but I seemed to have lost the picture of them.

Since the lights worked so well, I put a single green bulb in this shark pumpkin.

N1S called this our disco ball pumpkin. I made it with two sizes of drill bits. The candlelight really did shine out like a disco ball.

This is SP's small gray pumpkin that she named Squidward.

And about five or six other jack-o-lanterns filled up the remaining empty spots in the yard. Next year I may skip the tall skinny pumpkins because they are just too hard to clean out. I'll also allow about three extra hours for N1S to design his jack-o-lantern. SP finished three faces to his one.

Well, only 300 odd days until our next haunting. But less than two month until the next house decorating. If you live in Minnesota, I hope you already have your Christmas lights on the roof.