Whaddya mean "smell my feet"?

When I was growing up, there were a few times I tried to make my costume for Halloween.  I don't ever remember these being pulled off very successfully.  One year in particular I was trying to do the Wolfman thing.  I had a book that I had bought from the Scholastic Book sales thing - you know, where you filled out the sheet of paper with the names of all the books on it, checking off the books you wanted and gave it to your teacher with your check or cash (when you could still trust people with cash)?  I remember always being so darned excited when those boxes of books came in!

Anyway, I bought this book telling you how to make all sorts of costumes, supposedly using tricks of the film industry's special effects and makeup people.  I got all the "ingredients" together; well, as many as I could find in southwest Missouri.  What we couldn't find we just guessed at what it was and bought something that was, in retrospect, probably something completely different.  I remember a couple of the ingredients were cotton balls, some sort of brown dye, and corn syrup (to stick the cotton on yer face).  We needed some sort of wax for the fangs.  I can't remember if we were able to find the right stuff or not, but I do remember really sucking at the art of making realistic werewolf fangs.  They were supposed to be relatively small and pointy, and just stick to your canine teeth with relative ease.  In all actuality, they didn't really stick to my teeth, and I looked like I was just sucking on two small pieces of pizza without any sauce on them.  In addition to that, my brown-dyed-cotton-ball "fur" looked more like I had just gotten a bad case of poison ivy on my face, and instead of using calamine lotion, I dipped all of the cotton balls I could find in the house into some shoe polish and stuck them to my face.  Not exactly terror-inducing.  Oh, well.  I suppose it was still better than those old plastic masks and aprons, like "Casper", or any of these lame, and occasionally really creepy costumes.

They're so cute and cuddly!

We never, as far as I can remember, really got into decorating the house for Halloween, though - maybe a pumpkin or something, but nothing that spectacular.  I've seen some really awesome things up here, though. The subdivision in which we take Jenny's little cousin and best friend to trick or treat seems to have a healthy little competition going on as far as biggest and best decorating goes.  They've got everything from just simple, fun, non-scary stuff to some downright creepy stuff, like this family who set up their entire front yard to look like an old haunted cemetery, like this. 

Ooh, Spooky!

Oooh, Ghosty Face!

Better, yet less creepy pic of the reaper dude.

This reaper-lookin' dude was awesome!

 I'm thinking that one of these days Jenny and I may start doing stuff like this, because both of us think it looks so cool, and I, personally, would love to scare the bejeebuz outta some of the little junior high snits on our block!  Man, would that be fun!


As much as I dislike Candy Corns (tm), I realize that they're kind of the unofficial candy of Halloween, so those are the colors I chose for today's stroke - orange, yellow and white.  Gotta go see if Jenny was able to snag any of the girls' loot tonight - I'm in the mood for a Twix!