Happy Halloween

I love the Halloween traditions - buying a bunch of candy, locking yourself inside and eating it all with the lights turned down low so no one knows you're home.  Carving a pumpkin to rot on your porch until Thanksgiving, then pretending it belongs to the neighbors so you don't have to touch it.  Making a home-made costume - wearing your costume and having to pretend an 8 year old made it because you still don't know how to color in the lines.  

When I was growing up in New Zealand, Halloween wasn't something that we typically celebrated but because my father was American, he shared the tradition from his childhood. We don't grow the big orange pumpkins at home so he would have to carve one of the small dark green ones known as Buttercup. I looked for a picture so I could show you what they look like when carved but there are none. I have to give this one to America.  Good idea to go with orange. Even with a candle inside, they don't exactly glow the same way but we didn't know what it was supposed to look like and we loved it.

Buttercups - most ineffectual carved pumpkin ever.

I like Halloween but I'm a big scaredy baby about scary things - only movie I ever walked out of: Candyman. So even though I know it's not real, I'm still terrified. Candyman is real though. A friend once told me that if you watch a horror movie and block your ears, it won't be as scary because it's the music that really makes it terrifying. I disagree so I close my eyes. We were the perfect horror movie watching couple.  He couldn't hear a thing.  I couldn't see anything.  No one knew what was going on. Now, I find it easier to just not watch horrors.  It also really irritates me how in scary movies, the person about to be killed (a) goes to investigate when they clearly should get under the bed and play possum.  I do that at least 3 times a night and I'm still alive so seems pretty effective and (b) yells out "hello?" as if the killer is going to yell back - "yeah I'm in the kitchen making a coffee. You want anything?"
 
This year, against my better judgement, I agreed to go on the LA Haunted Hayride with a friend. It's up at Griffith Park which is where you go to bury all the people you kill. You get in the back of a trailer being towed by a tractor, sit on some authentic straw* and get dragged through the pitch black blackness. Along the way, you're terrorized by different scenes and creatures. There's the now defunct zoo filled with people being tortured in cages, the burning children at the orphanage, one of whom gave me a drawing she had done with the words "Help" on it. I did not help. Maybe if she'd been a cat in need...

Every step of the way, scary beings leap out and shove their faces in yours - they're not allowed to touch you but they get crazy close, especially when your "friend" is directing them towards you knowing you are terrified and she is merely amused. The gospel choir, circus and chanting monks did not make things better. They were dead. I was not expecting that. 

Public Service Announcement: 

• This ride is not for anyone that needs to sit in a chair. 
• This ride is not for anyone wearing heels and a nice frock. 
• This ride is not for anyone who is a big baby and has to apologize to everyone at the end for all the screaming**. 
• This ride is not for anyone who did not go to the bathroom first.
• There are no snacks on the ride.  Snacks would have made it less scary.  I could have thrown my snacks at the scary people***

So that was a good time.

My favorite part - food.

The best part about Halloween is the costumes**** but I much prefer the ones that are cobbled together from all the crap you have at home. I also don't understand how anything and everything can be sexified***** into a sexy costume.  Especially animals.

This one is billed as a "Courageous Lion".  I would like to see her with an actual lion - then we'll see how courageous she is.  Nice representation though, it looks exactly like all the pictures I have seen of lions.

This is a fox.  With a corset.  And shaved upper thighs.

Yep.  A deer.  I doubt she would last long out in the woods being hunted.  In her deer hoof heels.

 

And finally a sexy monkey.  When I met monkeys in India, they hissed at me, ate their own poop and tried to bite my head off.  I think I could take her.

But wait - this one is the best.  17 round tupperware containers and 2 square lids to the person that guesses what it is.

See end of post for answer

*I know it was authentic because it was uncomfortable and painful and a lot of it came home with me
**And a little bit of crying. But very brave crying
***Just kidding.  You can bite my head off before I give you my snacks.
****Lies. It's the candy.  Which I am not eating this year.  Just going to lick the tops. 
*****Spellcheck tells me this is not a word. Spellcheck is wrong. In fact "Spellcheck" is telling me that it itself is not a word so how can we believe anything it says.

ANSWER: Sexy Tarantula.  Even with all my costume fails, I think I did better than this.  There was the time I went as Steve Irwin "Crocodile Hunter" (everybody already thinks I'm Australian, seemed a perfect fit.  Only time ever that people said to me "Oh, I thought you were from New Zealand".  Fail.).  The next year I followed it up with the traditional dress of the New Zealand Maori.  Most unrecognized costume in America that year. This year I'm thinking of going as a sexy asparagus.  Which I will showcase in my house.  On the couch.  With the candy I bought for neighborhood children.  With the lights off. Watching happy movies.