I won't get into details, but Fall satisfies me.
I also like scaring people. I might be mildly sadistic. I am not into a gruesome display of homemade or store bought Halloween artifacts - I don't like rotting corpses or maggoty anything. Gag. However, I do love to scare others. My husband, unfortunately, can attest to that. I'm surprised he still likes me. He does seem to have come to accept that he'll never know whether or not walking into a darkened room is safe. There's always a 50-50 shot I'll be lying in wait behind the door, or the chair, or the bed. He thinks I'm going to give him a heart attack someday. I say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
I used to prey upon my brother. My brother is three years younger than me, and boy, I loved to scare him. And when it seemed that I could not as often get that genuine reaction of what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-you, I-now-need-a-new-pair-of-underwear, I started to resort to more intense operations.
My mother will never let go of her belated discovery that at several points in our childhood, I scared my brother by hiding in his closet. This took some serious reconnaissance work on my part and the results were spectacular. The best (or worst?) example was when I staked out the bottom left side of his closet about an hour before he headed up for bed. I stayed perfectly still and perfectly silent. I waited till he left to go to the bathroom, etc. I waited till after he went to bed and read for a bit and then turned out the lights. I waited until I could not possibly wait ANY longer and then I punched the inside of the closet door once. He tentatively asked "What was that?" into the darkness, and somehow I managed to stifle my giggles. I waited again as long as I could... Maybe 10 minutes... till I punched the door again. This went on for a while, while his inquiries got increasingly more anxious. Finally he sat up and turned on the lights, breathing hard and I thought the game was up. He stayed in bed, though, and eventually turned out the light. I waited till I heard him lay down, and then I slowly opened the closet door and creeped out as slowly as possible till I was within lunging range, at which point I lurched at his bed, grabbed his arm, and screamed. He occasionally still brings it up. When he talks about it, his eyes go a little wide, his head tilts, and he gets this crazy half-smile like: I can't believe you did that. You are one crazy mofo. My brother seems fine to me now. He's smart, he's accomplished. He has friends. He does play nerf wars in his dorm room regularly with his fellow Senior-in-College dormmates, but I have little worry that he does this because I damaged him in our childhood.
I did get my comeuppance in late highschool. My mom had read somewhere about how sometimes people dress up as a scarecrow and sit on the front stairs and scare people as they come up for candy - so we conspired to make it happen (Yea. I definitely get that sadistic side from her). I promised that I wouldn't scare little ones.
It worked brilliantly for a while. I wore a pillowcase over my head with teeny tiny eye holes, a straw hat, my dad's painting overalls, dad's shoes, gardening gloves and an old plaid shirt. We stuffed everything with newspaper and I lay, collapsed, on the stairs leading up to our door. I nearly gave my neighbor an early death. Oh yea. It was great fun till some punk ass 8 year old decided to get up real close and then punch me in the face.
No, I have no idea if he knew I was real, live, human being. But still... Did he have to punch me in the face? Geez.
I also like the mystery and the quiet and the joy! Candy! I absolutely HATE the idea of not being home for Halloween. I HATE the idea of being the ONLY house on the block whose light isn't on. I love the idea of carving pumpkins. I love toasty salted pumpkin seeds, I love cool carved pumpkin faces, I love candles!
Conveniently, every year, I seem to forget that I hate doing the actual hand-cramping carving. I hate digging the pumpkin brains out of the pumpkin. That part totally sucks.
In spirit of attempting to remember the annoying-ness of ACTUALLY carving a pumpkin (and how it always seems to happen ON Halloween day BY myself ... rushing to have it out in time for trick-or-treaters).... Here are the photos of last year's pumpkins:
This one took me a couple of hours. It's the first time I tried real sculptural carving. It was fun and I might do it again because I didn't even try to hollow it out! :)
and I liked this one, because despite the hollowing it, the design was super easy:
This year I've gathered photos for inspiration for potential carved pumpkins. Care to take a gander? Forgive me - I'm usually not bad at including credits, but these are photos I just saved to my inspirational file and didn't include references:
(pumpkin pi? get it? get it?)
Yay for Halloween!
Are you carving a pumpkin this year?
1 comment:
I loved jumping out of the dark hallway when my sister was coming up to bed, nothing as lengthy as your haunt! You sure are dedicated!
We already did one set of pumpkins at a pumpkin party, haven't taken the pics yet, but my son did darth vader. He loved the pics of the death star and R2D2. Maybe we'll have the 6 year olds version after this weekend.
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