As usual I am always looking out for ways to freak out neighbors. Of course it’s always fun to do it at Halloween, but that’s expected. I like to do it at different times and in unexpected ways. I found these severed fingers and immediately started thinking about Halloween. Moments later my brain started going beyond Halloween and came up with some great ideas. I love to decorate for Christmas. I know, sounds strange right? Actually not strange if you think of all of the fun things you can scatter around mixed in with your plastic Santas and elves. People get very freaked out when you mess with Christmas. I love it as much as the next person, but that doesn’t mean I have no sense of humor. Try sticking these severed fingers on your Christmas tree, so it looks like someone is clawing their way out. How about putting them in the hay in your nativity scene on the front lawn. Better yet! Stick them in the turkey before you bring it to the table. Maybe not…might be a little too freaky for some of the older folks. Point is…have some fun. You’d be amazed at what you could come up with to do with these fingers.

Well, after spending the last month searching for the best Halloween decorations, recipes, costumes, decorating my new house and watching movies here are my thoughts. LAME! Okay not totally lame, but not as good as in years past. My biggest gripe was Halloween decor or the lack there of. Every Halloween I have spent hundreds of dollars on new decorations for the store and for the house that I could not live without. This year I spent $19.00 and that was just for spiderwebs, candles and misc. crap. WTF?! My thoughts are that with the bad economy they just didn’t really come out with anything new and scaled back on some of the more pricey items. My favorite has always been animatronics. I love things that move and say things. The ones they had this year were cheap looking and weren’t all that scary frankly.  Costumes were pretty lame as well. I wanted to post the scariest costume of the year, but I really didn’t see anything that was worth even a wimper. Some of the bad costumes that were popular, like Micheal Jackson and Octomom, were just in bad taste and stupid. Decorating our new house was great and everything worked better than we had hoped. We even got voted as the scariest house in the neighborhood, but there were a few that were really close. We’ll have to step it up a bit next year. Movie selection in the theaters was not even worth discussing, though rarely is it. All I can say is I really hope next year the economy is back on track and decorations are plentiful. This is my favorite time of the year and I found it depressing to go into stores that normally have huge Halloween displays and only had pitifully small racks of cheesy decor. Just my two cents.

A while back a reader sent me the link to this group on YouTube.com. I have since listened to everything they have and have fallen in love with them. If you are having a party this weekend you really need to include them in your music. From what I can tell they are actually from Sweden, but you’d never guess it from their songs. Check out their website where you can buy all of their albums. The lead singer sounds just like Johnny Cash! Take a listen to Last Night Down By the Grave below. This one is on the slower side, but they can really get rockin’. My favorite is probably Halloween which you can find on their myspace page, but I really like Back From the Grave too. Well, hell I love them all actually. Give them a listen. You’ll be glad you did. Thanks Per Arne Iznogood for introducing me to this great band.

Years ago when we were first setting up the bookstore we were determined to find a full-size skeleton for an idea we had. Seems like it would be easy, right? Nope. At least not then anyway. All of the skeletons we found were not full-size. Most of them were 3 or 4 feet tall at the most. Finally we were forced to go to a medical supply company to get one. It looked great, but it weighed a ton and the bones were very sharp. It was so hard to move around without getting poked. I am very excited to see that finally a light weight realistic full-size skeleton finally exists for only $34.50. At 64″ it still isn’t as tall as I would like, but it is adult size so I can’t complain. Every year we take a few things from the store to decorate with at home. The skeleton quickly became one of those items. In the store she is set up in an antique wheelchair and sits near the window. We put a victorian looking dress on her with a Mrs. Bates wig. You know Mrs. Bates from Psycho? Gray hair in a bun? Anyway, we bring Mrs. Bates home every Halloween and set her up in a wing chair in our front window. We turn out all the lights and point a slow strobe light on her. We then tie clear fishing wire around her wrist and run it through a hook in the ceiling. Whenever an unsuspecting trick-r-treater comes to the door one of us sits behind the chair and pulls on the fishing wire to make her look like she’s waving. This really freaks the kids out and some of the parents too. I’m tempted to get one of these light weight skeletons too, so we don’t have to drag Mrs. Bates home every Halloween. Each time I set her up I think of the ending of Psycho when Norman has been arrested and is thinking to himself:

They know I can’t move a finger, and I won’t. I’ll just sit here and be quiet, just in case they do… suspect me. They’re probably watching me. Well, let them. Let them see what kind of a person I am. I’m not even going to swat that fly. I hope they are watching… they’ll see. They’ll see and they’ll know, and they’ll say, “Why, she wouldn’t even harm a fly…”

Right about now you are probably starting to give the pumpkins you bought a look. You know the look, right? The one that shows you are speculating how you plan on cutting the thing up. This can be a daunting task for anyone. I spend a lot of time on this very thing every year. I just get so bored with the standard jack-o-lantern even though it can be quite scary. You know the one they show during the credits at the beginning of the original Halloween? That one is so simple, yet so scary. Maybe it’s because I know what’s coming in the movie. Anyway, someone gave me the book Extreme Pumpkins last year and it has opened up a whole new world to me. This book is based on the website www.extremepumpkins.com created by Tom Nardon. If you’ve never heard of the site or the book you need to check it out immediately. He will get you so excited about carving your pumpkin!

A reader sent this recipe in to me, so I thought I’d share it with you. I’ve never made these, but I can’t wait until later this week to try it. All you need is an eyeball jello mold, and a few ingredients. You can also use round ice cube trays or even the round artist pallets that you can buy in any art store. As long as you clean it thoroughly you can use anything that has the right shape.

Ingredients:

3 tsp of unflavored gelatin

Food coloring (blue, green, red and yellow)

Cooking Oil Spray

3 Tbsp low fat milk

1 1/2 Tbsp sugar

1/2 Tbsp imitation lemon or coconut extract. (your choice)

Cold and boiled water

Straw, cotton ball, toothpick and a container with a small spout for filling.

Instructions for Whites of Eyes:

Spray a small amount of cooking oil inside of the cavity of the plastic mold. Put 2  1/2 tsp of gelatin in a bowl. Add 1/4 cup boiling water. Stir until completely dissolved. Add 1/4 cup cold water and stir well. Stir in 3 Tbsp of low fat milk, 1/2 Tbsp of extract, and 1 1/2 Tbsp of sugar. Stir well. Using a container with a small spout, pour the liquid into the mold. Place the mold in the refrigerator overnight. After the gelatin solidifies, take out the white eyes.

Iris Eye Color Instructions:

Put 1/2 tsp gelatin in a small bowl. Add 1 Tbsp boiling water. Stir until dissolved. Stir in 1 Tbsp cold water. Add a drop or two of any food coloring that you desire, and stir. Use a straw to fill the iris craters by first dipping one end of the straw into the liquid. Then, place your thumb over the other end of the straw to trap the liquid in the straw. Release the liquid from the straw into the iris until it is filled. The iris will solidify in the refrigerator within minutes.

Making the Pupil in the Eye:

Mix the following food colors in a small bowl: 2 drops red, 1 drop blue, and one drop green.  Dip the end of a toothpick into this mixture. Jab the toothpick into the middle of the iris. Repeat the process until the pupil is large enough to see.

Making the Bloodshot Eye Effect:

Drop a few drops of red food coloring onto a plate. Take a cotton ball or a Q-tip and loosen the fibers so that they look frayed. Dip the cotton lightly into the food coloring. Lightly dab the white part of the eyeball until the desired effect is achieved.

Thanks to Ghoulgirl for this great recipe!

This caught my eye and my heart the other day. At first I was very excited by the idea of the Broomba, but then I realized that it is in fact just a Halloween decoration. We’ve all heard of the Roomba, right? The self-propelled vacuum? Well, I have hardwood floors and those don’t work well on them. I know, they say they do, but they don’t. When I saw this I thought: Yay! A self-propelled broom. Of course I didn’t stop to think how that would work. Anyway, once I realized this was not what I thought it was I was still happy. A haunted broom. It is sound-activated, so everyone will be surprised when it starts moving around cackling and playing creepy music. They also automatically change direction when they hit something. So, at your next Halloween party have a bunch of these scattered around and they’ll be moving around and banging into things constantly. It would be a riot. Unfortunately these have sold out for the season. I read that they were so popular that they will probably bring them back next year. Now if only it actually did sweep up the cat hair it would be perfect.

A few weeks ago a reader told me about putting a ring of ghosts around a tree. Years ago I saw this as well, but did not think it was scary enough, so I created my own version. This has become probably the most successful and popular decoration we do in our yard. The problem we ran into was that the tree we had in our front yard was in a corner, so no way to put a ring of anything around it. So we came up with putting a large black plastic cauldron in the center. Inside we put one of those small flaming pot lights. You can also just use dry ice inside or a small fogger. Next we bought six strong garden stakes about 48″ long and six 6-8″ Styrofoam balls. We then put the stakes in the ground and pushed the Styrofoam balls onto the tops of the stakes to look like a head. I personally did not think the white fabric was all that scary, so I found some cheap black cloth at the fabric store and bought six yards. I think it cost $1.99/yd. I cut the fabric into six pieces and then draped each head and stake with it. Not completely over their head like a ghost, but more of hooded cloak. Once I figured out how I wanted the fabric to sit I glued it down to the heads. I then safety pinned the fabric right below the head and then a couple more times all the way down to keep the fabric closed. I pulled up a corner from each one and then the one next to it and tied them together. This makes them look like they are holding hands. When I was done I also added some small cuts to the bottoms of the fabric, so it looked tattered. We then decided this wasn’t scary enough and wanted some sort of creepy music. We ended up downloading some scary sounding monk chanting onto a CD. We hid a CD player in the bushes, turned on the flaming cauldron and ta da creepy Devil Worshipers. Later we decided to spray paint the Styrofoam balls black, which made it look even scarier. Every year we pull this out and it is by far the one thing we get the most comments on. I even get a little chill when I walk by and hear the moaning chanting monks. Thanks Beautiful Kind for reminding me of this project.

I’m not a big fan of those plastic Scene Setter things in general. You know, the fake-looking pictures of bookcases and skeletons sitting on sofas that you put on a wall? They never look realistic. They are kind of the lazy man’s Halloween decoration. For those of you that use them here’s a question: Do you ever have someone walk up to one and try to take something off the shelf? Does anyone ever try to sit down on that sofa next to the skeleton? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Well, unless they’re drunk, I guess. That would be pretty funny actually. I might use one then if I knew some of my guests have a tendency to drink too much. Otherwise no. Now this Sound and Lights Witch Door Decor is a different animal all together. This is really cool and I would totally hang this up. First off, it looks scary which is already far and above the traditional scene setters. Secondly, it has motion activated sound and lights. The sounds are of a witch laughing and cackling and the eyes light up. Yes, I realize no one will mistakenly try to walk down the hall through the door. Unless of course there is liquor involved then anything can happen. For $14.50 it’s a cheap decoration that really sets a mood.

Years ago I visited a restaurant in New York called the Jekyll & Hyde Club. I go back everytime I’m there. It’s my fav. If you haven’t been there it’s a theme restaurant, but one for the scary minded like myself. It’s Halloween year round, it’s a total tourist trap and I love it!. The food is okay, but you don’t go for the food. You go for the ambiance. It’s decorated like a haunted house with a different theme for each of the 4 floors. Throughout the day they do live shows on the main floor and it’s a riot. Well, anyway one time I was there I sat near the werewolf head and it taunted me throughout our meal. I absolutely loved this effect and have desperately tried to recreate it for the store without success. The problem is you have to have someone on the other side of the wall that can see who is in front of the head at all times. I can’t hire someone just for that! I’m still waiting for an animatronic one that will at least say some different things, but so far nothing. I found this website where you can build your own Werewolf Head that doesn’t talk pictured bottom right. The directions are so involved though. You would need to be an artist to pull this off or you could buy the Werewolf pictured below left and be done with it. It’s expensive, but I know I’d screw it up if I tried to make one.