Halloween 2011. I've been trying to scale back my front yard productions over the years and have but I still do more than I expect. With the good if not great weather and no rain in sight, I felt okay putting more lights and extension cords out into the lawn.
Soup of the Day: I have collected so many little things for Halloween over the years that I don't use everything each year so every year is a little different. This year, I didn't use the always popular fog machine but did bust out the human remains jars. In truth, these are old Red Vines plastic containers from Costco that we use to have at work that I'd collect and relabel. The "soup" is just water, ketchup, and some salad dressing. The plastic skull just popping up from the muck just makes this.
Cauldrons: In the past, I've have anything from colored lights inside to fog spewing out. This year, I had the motion activated pumpkin but no one was looking in and triggering it so I moved the pumpkin out into the open with the Soup of the Day jar.
I only used about two of these candy pumpkins this year. A light year with maybe 35 kids total. The neighborhood changes every few years with more kids to less. I think we are in some waning years with kids since what kids we did have were older. Not many of the traditional teen boys who show up late and can't bother to wear a costume. For those kids, I usually throw some Taco Bell sauce packets into their sack quickly so they think they are getting candy. Slackers do NOT get rewarded at MY house!! lol
The front of the yard from the side. Lots of lights.
A raven sits on a chair next to a table (TV tray) at the front of the fence. In reality, it was to cover a big old tree root that I didn't want the kids tripping on.
A hand-me-down from another haunted yard down the street. They use to set up a huge dungeon in their front yard every year 10 years ago and, when the word got out, parents were trucking in their kids from out of town to see the dungeon. It helped that the guy handed out huge candy bars too. We use to get the run off of kids from that yard down the street so things were hopping a decade ago. But about 7 years ago, the police cracked down when there were just too many kids. Just as well since it prompted many lazy kids and parents to just drive their kids to only certain houses that looked promising (Drive-By Trick-or-Treating). So after the police closed down the dungeon, the owner gave us a nice tombstone and trunk. The owner gave the dungeon to one of the cops, in a brilliant move to forge some goodwill between him and the Po-Po.
My lack of motivation to do some yardwork helped to make the yard more suitable for Halloween.
A gift from my brother from 2004: The inflatable pumpkin. This thing is huge. One day, and I thought today might be that day, I'll figure out how to rig it onto the roof. I point it to the side street as an attention getter.
My talking pumpkin, which lights up too when it senses motion. This seemed to get a few kids jumping this year.
Lots of lights. The purple web lights normally hang in the porch but they worked well hanging on the hedges.
Normally this guy is a motion sensor prop as well but I didn't have the time or batteries to outfit all the devices this year.
By day, the walkway looks terrible with pine tree roots, the bane of my existence, pushing the bricks out of whack. But for Halloween, other than the ones that might be a tripping hazard, the funkiness works well.
This year, I was worried that I didn't have enough candy but I really didn't get many kids. There were some memorable costumes though like the two girls dressed up as a Krispy Kreme Donut and a slice of pizza. We had a Jango Fett and a Boba Fett (brothers), a cowboys, two flappers, and the Teen Age Mutant Ninja Turtles although the fifth guy in the group decided to be the oddball and wear an Obama mask (Huh??). In general, less kids but older kids (usually polite girls who were old enough to drive), not many punk boys in no costume, but some good costumes.
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