by Zangz
#1. Start to celebrate Halloween in late September through October! Since Halloween falls on just ONE day, and usually a weekday for that matter, you’d be limiting yourself from a lot of the Halloween hi-jinx that goes on all month long! Start getting into the mood on the last week of September and let it roll through October! Make sure you plan something Halloweenish for friends and family at least once a week. See other suggestions for ideas.
#2. Visit a local Haunted House! This is my favorite thing to do through the Halloween season!! Many towns have more than a few groups of people who put on a walk-through dark attraction, many times for charity, during the weekends of October. Some of these dark attractions will really surprise you with lots of incredible effects, while some are just a dark maze with a small kid with a sheet over his head trying to scare you, so do some research. Check your local paper and surf the web to find which ones you want to go to and which ones are worth going to. Try to visit one haunted house once a weekend in October. You can see my Haunted House section of Zangz’s Halloween Hallow for tips on attending a Haunted House.
#3. Decorate! Go hog wild at your home or at work (if allowed). You can find tons upon tons of Halloween decorations in almost any drug store as well as party store. I usually put my Halloween junk up the last week in September, through the first week of November.
#4. Surf the web. You can spend hours getting inspired for the holiday by visiting the umpteen Halloween websites that are out there. Just type the word “Halloween” into any search engine (Yahoo!) and you’ll get many, many, many results!
#5. Read a good spooky book. I’ll try and pick up a creepy novel and read it through the month of October. Some of the best have been, Stephen King’s “Salem’s Lot” and “Pet Cemetery”. Tales of true ghost stories are pretty good also. Just look in the New Age area in your local book store. If you don’t like to be scared when reading (wimp!) then you can always pick up a book about Halloween. I strongly suggest Silver Ravenwolf’s “Halloween”.
#6. Listen to spooky music! While I’m working on my computer or driving in my car I’ll usually listen to a CD. When it comes upon the Halloween season, I’ll be listening to a couple bands in particular. First, the Midnight Syndicate has a number of CDs out that can be described as instrumental mood music for haunting. It’s especially good if you’re a “yard haunter” who sets up little graveyards or other Halloween displays in your yard. If you have a Midnight Syndicate CD playing in the background, it’s sure to bring chills down Trick-Or-Treaters spines. Another band I like to listen to during the season is Type-O-Negative. Sometimes being described as a Goth Metal band, these guys really have the whole Autumnal feel melded into their music. I love to listen to them while I work or surf on the computer or especially as I go out for a drive and pass by the trees changing color. The music fits! I suggest either their “October Rust” or even more so, their “World Coming Down” CDs. “World Coming Down” features two Halloween influenced songs, “Creepy Green Light” and “All Hallows Eve”.
#7. BEER!! What do you mean you can’t see where that fits into Halloween? Well, many of the breweries out there come out with special blends of beer calling them Oktoberfest. Many of these are brewed with spices, barleys and hops that, when tasted, really do bring fall to your taste buds and pallet. I suggest Honker’s Ale Oktoberfest, and my all time favorite brew, Samuel Adams Oktoberfest (it’s even got Halloween colors on its packaging!!). Must be 21 years of age to enjoy this suggestion!!
#8. TV shows. Now, I’m not only talking about the classic, “It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown”. I’m also talking about other programming that haunt our boob-tubes during Halloween season. Cable TV channels such as Travel, TLC, Discovery and a few others always have special shows on many creepy and eerie subjects such as true ghost stories, vampires, haunted places, famous graves, unsolved mysteries and other ghoulish oddities. It’s fun viewing with the lights off.
#9. Put up a Yard Haunt. Go get some tools, paint and a sense of imagination and put up a little grave yard in front of your home. Or put some spooky looking dummy sitting in a chair all covered with spider webs. The only limitation is your imagination… except for the fact that you may have fuddy-duddy neighbors who might be annoyed or even offended by your display. Either keep it simple or kill your fuddy-duddy neighbors in their sleep and prop their bodies up in front of your home as part of your display. (I’m JUST KIDDING on that last part!!!)
#10. Avoid religious zealotry. It seems this time of year brings out the fearful, bitter, unhappy people who want to ruin the holiday for everybody by spouting out their anti-Halloween propaganda. Just ignore and avoid them. If they want to believe that Halloween is “The Devil’s Holiday” and that those that celebrate it are devil worshipers, let them. We are all allowed to believe what we want to. That’s what makes this country great!! Just click off the TV when you come across some televangelist preaching against the holiday, and go do one of these other things on the list. No point in getting yourself all cheesed off and grumpy about somebody else’s ignorance and hatred!
#11. Throw a Halloween Party! This one takes great effort, but if you find yourself having the time, money, space and sense of imagination, go for it!!
#12. Visit spooky sights. Many historical sites also have rumors of being haunted. If they don’t, visit anyway, after all, who ever heard of a big, spooky, old mansion not having at least on ghost roaming about! Some graveyards will give tours, especially if there are people of historical value buried within.
#13. Visit a pumpkin farm!! You don’t have to be a kid to head out to the country and hit a pumpkin farm. The big ones usually have some form of Haunted House and/or corn maze to go through as well.
#14. Do some pumpkin carving. Making Jack-O-Lanturns can be a blast if done with the right friends and twisted imagination.
You may ask, “Zangz, where the heck am I supposed to find time to do any of this stuff?”
I answer, MAKE TIME!!!! Life is too short to not partake in the imaginative world of Halloween!
