What Doesn't Kill Us

... makes us hate our parents.

When I was really young, my mother didn't drive, so my dad would drive the family everywhere. And for a guy who didn't like to go anywhere, that probably made him pretty miserable. So he was surely thrilled years later when my mother finally got her driver's license and could bus the kids around in his absence.

But before those golden days, my mother would food shop every Thursday of every week, and she'd need my dad to drive her there. My brother and I would tag along and we'd usually drop my mother off and my dad would drive us somewhere nearby. One time it was a cemetery right down the road. There was a creek and an old train bridge behind the cemetery. So we started walking along the tracks. As we approached the bridge, my dad started walking across the old ties. Some were missing and he was taking wide strides to clear them. The bridge was above a stream with lots of big rocks - pointed rocks. It doesn't take long for my dad to realize that his sons aren't with him any longer. We were still back at the start of the bridge, watching him as you'd watch someone crossing a mine field. And I knew that wasn't going to be very popular. And it wasn't. He stopped, turned, and issued the orders for us to start across. Being somewhere around 9 years old, and my father being somewhere around an angry Harvey Keitel, I started to walk. Slowly.

He yells that insane thing that is yelled in a million movies, and never obeyed - "Don't look down!" As a general rule (unless your life depends on it), if you're giving that advice to someone, you probably should be doing something else. So I looked down. And my knees locked up. Literally. The only time in my life that I was physically frozen with fear. So my dad storms across, grabs my hand, and yanks me to solid ground. It made me wish I dropped through the wooden ties and took one for the team. That would have fixed him.

Back at the grocery store as we helped load up the car with the bags of food and stuff, I'm sure my mother must have asked where we went..."Did you boys have fun?"

I hope I said something like "Your ape tried to kill us. Did you buy toilet paper?"


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Pumpkin Feast

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This tortoise reminded me of a family pet we had when I was young. An eastern box turtle. He lived in our yard all year long. Dug down into a hole in the winter and hibernated until the first thaw of spring. Then he came up and slipped into his watering hole (a black plastic paint roller tray) for hours to rehydrate. He was like a dog. A small, leathery, slow-moving, dinosaur dog. He'd hunt for worms during rain storms and eat my mother's strawberries before she could pick them. If you were out in the yard, he'd saunter over (in his own way) and sit by your toes.

Then one very cold spring morning, during a heavy rain storm, my father mentioned "I gave the turtle a hand this morning with the shovel. I helped him out." I don't know much about turtle engineering, but they dig their holes in a way that will prevent them from drowning during heavy rains. My father had created some kind of mini-crater around our turtle's hole and it promptly filled up with icy cold water. We tried to return it to the way it was, but the hole just stayed that way - filled to the brim with muddy brown water. A week later, when the real spring thaw arrived, our turtle was a no-show. And my father was a murderer.

Plastic Masks

One of my earliest costume memories would be of Casper. That friendly ghost. Having a brother and uncreative parents meant that we both would be Casper that year. We should have strapped ourselves together and gone as Caspers the Siamese Ghosts.

My father, always trying to feel inventive and help those that aren't in need of help, got a pair of scissors and cut the eye holes and mouth holes on our masks to enable better seeing and breathing - two things that, to him, the mask manufacturers missed. Even at that early age I can remember feeling stupid with most of my face hanging out of Casper's face. The sharp edges left by my father's hack job probably didn't tickle, but I can't remember that detail, thankfully.

I'll have to get my hands on the old photo albums at my parents' and scan a bunch of Halloween shots. The Casper ones in particular.

Here's a kid that had a lesser father who left the mask intact.

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Haunt Theory: Lighting

Got a question about my lighting techniques. The insanely-talented Rob at SkullandBone.com has the finest lighting tutorial around. I agree with his approach as it front-lights your props and creates some beautiful shadows and accents the most important part of your hard work - the front.

My yard haunt has two main issues that forced me to light the haunt from the above tree branches:

1. A super bright and super close street lamp (that provides a lot of ambient front-lighting).
2. A horrible family that walks through the lawn of the yard haunt, between the props, and under the tree.

One experience comes to mind. I use two strings of flickering flame bulbs for under my witches' iron cauldron. I love that effect and take a crazy amount of time to perfect it. Placing the twigs and sticks of the fire carefully as to hide the bulbs and wires, but to allow enough orange light through. A member of my family walked across the lawn and got tangled in the extension cord running to those lights. I watched those flickering bulbs go flying quite a few times over the years. Pushing the lights and sticks back under the cauldron quickly before more trick or treaters arrive is another sickening ritual I could do without. I can only imagine if I ran cords to the front of my display to feed flood lamps placed there. It's surprising how many people actually cut through the small lawn of my yard haunt.

So it's actually a practical use of lighting, and I'm surprised my family doesn't climb the tree at some point during the night, tangling my wires and breaking my bulbs while they fish around in the branches.

That said, I think tree lighting from above can work if you keep in mind the importance of shadows. I always make sure some pine needles and branches of the tree are in front of the flood lamps. And I try not to go overboard with making the haunt too bright. I think of it as moonlight. Smaller bulbs stuffed into the bushes or cornstalks on each side of the porch add a lot of atmosphere. In the case of my witches' smoking cauldron, I had a green spotlight shining straight down into the cauldron. The fog appeared to be giving off a ghostly green glow.


Every year, I venture back to where I grew up and haunt my folks' lawn. I won't be doing that forever and I'm looking forward to a change of scenery and a new environment. And you can bet I'll be using some of SkullandBone's techniques for lighting it.

Crepe Pumpkin Candy Packets

A couple years ago, I decided to go all-out on the behind-the-scenes festivities on Halloween night. I made a beef stew with a holiday wine-laced broth, filled bowls with mixed nuts and candy, loaded a basket with shiny red apples, and spread out a few hot appetizers. Looked like a pretty cool Halloween bash forming. I figured it would be worth it since some of my coworkers usually showed up to see my display, along with a hundred people my parents and sister invited - none of which are all that into Halloween. Topping it off was the annual crockpot filled with spiced wine, cranapple juice, and cinnamon sticks. That's always a highlight with my coworkers - hot spiced wine while getting the grand tour of the display. My instructions are very clear - "Mom, I have some people coming over later, so don't turn the crockpot off. Even if you think I'm done with it, just leave it on." She nervously turns it off, and heating up ceramic mugs of spiced wine in the microwave at the end of the night has become another annual tradition.

Nobody ate the nuts, or the apples. Two people tried the stew. The bowl of Halloween M&Ms was empty.

That same year, I made crepe paper pumpkins with candy and soft squishy eyeball toys inside. Got the instructions from the October Martha Stewart magazine. Took a long time to do and they looked really neat. I don't remember how many I made, but I gave them all out. I'd say that 90% of the trick or treaters gave me a look as if I were dropping a bar of soap into their bags of candy. As a child, on Halloween night, if I got a soft crepe paper pumpkin obviously filled with candy, I probably would have taken it home and fallen asleep holding the little orange thing - trying to figure out what was inside it without wanting to tear it open. Counting the pieces of candy with my fingertips through the paper. It probably would have been mid-November before I ripped the crepe paper skin. I really can't imagine what was so confusing to them. Maybe they thought they weren't getting candy, that I was pulling a fast one on them. That they were filled with raisins.

In the morning hours of November 1st that year, after I had broken down the Halloween display and was heading to my car to drive home and go to bed, I looked up the street and saw a tiny orange pumpkin on the asphalt. One of my crepe paper pumpkins. It was un-torn and perfect. I drove home with it on the dashboard. I ate the candy in the morning and played with the soft squishy eyeball for the next month. I think I brought it to work and it's still probably somewhere in the office covered with lint and dust.

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Reminds me of the time I brought authentic Christmas Crackers to my parents' house for Christmas. "Who do you think YOUUU are? The Queen of England?" That sort of thing.

Christmas Evil

I possess no memory of believing in Santa at any point in my life. I believe my parents avoided the whole affair by just ignoring him and hoping he went away. None of the presents I got ever said "From: Santa" and we never left cookies for the guy. So we grew up thinking Christmas was just a time of year when your family gave you stuff and Santa was just an image associated with the holiday, like pumpkins, cats, and witches for Halloween.

I do remember my mother telling us a story when I was really young. She said it was Christmas Eve when it happened and she was probably around five years old. She awoke during the night and saw a shadow on the wall out in the hallway outside her bedroom - the shadow of a skinny figure with a pointed hat, and she heard jingling. She told us how terrified she was and how she pulled the sheets over her head in horror. We'd make her tell the creepy Christmas story every year. It never gets old. Thank GOD I never made the connection between that shadow and Santa Claus. I probably would have wet the bed every single Christmas Eve.

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I Know How He Feels

Many Halloweens ago, I remember getting home from a long night of candy hunting, arms tired from my bulky pillowcase, and seeing my father waiting for us (my brother and sister too). He looked really excited about something. I always joked that in the film of my life Harvey Keitel would play the part of my father - in both looks and demeanor. So seeing him excited was strange. Then I saw them. Gifts! Small packages! Wrapped in the washed-out colors of the Sunday comic strips. Newspaper wrapping paper was pretty impressive from a guy that never even knew what Christmas presents we were opening (even the ones that said "From: Dad"). He had three gifts: one for me, one for my brother, and one for my sister. He handed us our presents and I remember the weight and feel of mine giving it away - I was about to open a very cool and heavy train locomotive. I was already thinking my brother and sister would be opening some other cars from the same train set. Super excited, I tore the wrapping away from the train and found a rectangular rock. I remember looking over and seeing my brother and sister holding their rocks. Then I remember my old man laughing.

Every Halloween when I set up the fog machine outside their house, I always grab rocks from under the tree to level the fogger and support it on the slope of their lawn. The same rocks we opened all those years ago. I can almost picture him digging through the ivy that night a few decades ago laughing out loud as he found three gift-sized stones to give to his children.

The Rules

Every Halloween, I haunt the house where my parents live. I never had enough trick or treaters wherever I lived, so it made sense to make a homecoming each year and continue the haunt that I had started in the years when I actually DID live there. This way the neighborhood kids could enjoy the haunt that they grew to expect each year - something to look forward to each Halloween season. I never knew I'd eventually see children that were too scared to come up to get candy grow up and marry and have kids of their own that were too scared to come up for candy. (Though I've come to realize that the number of kids no longer matters to me.)

Anyway, I have two basic rules that I kindly explain to my mother, father, and sister (who visits each year with her sons).

THE RULES:

1. Please keep the front door closed so the light from inside the house doesn't break the mood and atmosphere of the darkened porch.

2. Please wait to go in or out of the house until trick or treaters have passed.

Both seem like easy rules to follow. And even if they seemed irrational or silly, surely you could humor me and abide by them. Right? On that one night a year I live for, right?

So I've created a tradition of becoming Michael Myers in order to hand out candy on Halloween night. I just sit there motionless until a child comes up for candy. Then I slowly drop some candy into their bag. No jumping or startling scares. Not my style.

So this year, a small child dressed as Michael Myers comes up for candy. A golden moment. He and I realize the significance of what's happening as we both do the famed Myers head-tilt at each other. I reach inside the bowl of candy slowly and grab five pieces of candy for this mini Michael Myers. "OH LOOK!!!! IT'S MICHAEL MYERS!!!!!!! OH LOOK AT THAT!!!!! LOOK-AT-IT!!!! LOOK-AT-IT!!!!!!!" shrieks my mother from behind me, the front door wide open, light streaming onto the porch. The kid looking up at her in an unspoken "Let's both kill her" sort of way. The moment was gone. Spoiled. Dried up and lost forever. Magic no more. And that's my point. It happened a few more times over the night. Then things got a little better, rules were followed to some degree, probably by accident.

Then my sister stepped into the candy bowl when trying to squeeze past me, and fell face first onto the walkway, landing on spilled candy that her foot didn't already squish. My only hope was that approaching trick or treaters assumed Myers had killed another victim and that it was all part of the show.

I'm glad she didn't land on any of my pumpkins.