Monday, November 10, 2014

Halloween 2014




Halloween this year did not go at all as planned.

It remains true that if I want to accomplish certain things for Halloween, I need to decide in advance. That may not be enough.

I had plans. I was going to finally finish that one canvas project I started years ago. I had four books I was going to read. I had seven movies that I wanted to watch, and while I didn't think I would get all of them, I was going to get a few. Also, I was going to dress up. I didn't have any specific goals for decorating, but I assumed I would do some fun pumpkins, and they would be ones I had grown myself.

I guess the plan first started to fall apart when I didn't get any pumpkins. I planted pumpkin seeds, and I got cute little sprouts and vines and blossoms, but never any actual gourds. I think the crookneck squash suppressed them. I can't prove it, but I have my reasons:


Next up were the books. I did read Killing Monsters: Our Children's Need for Fantasy, Heroism, and Make-Believe Violence by Gerard Jones, and it was excellent. I could read it because the library had it. They did not have Pumpkin: The Curious History of an American Icon by Cynthia Ott, The Romance of Dracula: A Personal Journey of the Count on Celluloid  by Charles Butler, or Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human by Deborah Christie. I could have lived with this, but they were all kind of inordinately expensive in bookstores.

To be fair, I probably would have been behind on my reading anyway, and I had already decided that it would be okay for Pumpkin to slip into November, but that's just not how it worked out.

I say I would have been behind because it does take me longer to get to things than I will think. I never thought I would see all seven movies. As it was, I only actually watched Practical Magic in October. I did watch I Married A Witch, but it was November already. Still, that did essentially get me through all of the witch movies, though there would be some overlap with Nicole Kidman movies if I had gotten to The Others from the ghost movies.

(Other movies include The Time of Their Lives, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, and I don't know that Gaslight really fit there, but I do want to see it eventually. Also, I would really love to see The Uninvited again, because I only have very vague memories of it, but it does not seem to be generally available.)

The first weekend in October I got out the canvas work, and I cut out all the letters, the leaves, and the pumpkins, except that something went wrong and I ran out of canvas for the lower half of one pumpkin. I think I can still make it work, or hey, buy new canvas, but no, it was not completed by Halloween.

I never decided on a costume, which will be its own post, and I never had a strong feeling for any specific pumpkin carving theme. I did carve a pumpkin, and I thought I was doing a fairly random face, though it came out looking a little like our new cat, who can be kind of ferocious.

Mostly, though, I want to say that it was all okay. The reason Halloween is important for me is for the creativity, and maybe a little for the scares, and I had that in spades because of writing the 6-page scripts. That was totally something that could interfere with the reading and movie watching. It interfered with my regular television watching, but that's one reason for the DVR. I got to use my creativity.

There were some themes that worked well with Halloween. One of the reasons I wanted to read the zombie book was that despite their enormous popularity I don't really care for them, but  I wrote three different scripts with zombies. I had some vampires show up, and pirates, two kinds of demons, fairies, giant spiders, and a cat named Pumpkin! There was kind of a witch figure in one, and there was a cannibal rat ghost ship, so really, I think Halloween was pretty well covered.

I do still want to see all of those movies, plus others, and read all of those books, and I do want to finish the canvas project, but nonetheless, October was a good month this year, and I suspect it will be a good month next year too.

I regret nothing (this time).

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