For the second year, the house on the hill in Lakeshire pulled out all the stops for their annual Halloween celebration. It was the biggest and best year yet, utilizing favorite props from the previous year, new projects for the current year, and old props that have been in use since the apartment days in Morganton, NC. The TV played back old episodes of Tales from the Crypt season 1 while our 5 foot tall cardboard stand up of the Crypt Keeper watched along in the corner. Our “Dracula’s Pub” sign glowed behind the bar while the “Doctor” was in – eyes glowing a rainbow of colors behind his hollow skull. Chocolate covered strawberries, graham cracker candies, cookies, cocktail weenie mummies, coconut breaded chicken tenders, sweet potato empanadas and punch all lined the bar. It was Halloween, of course – and time and time again the children who braved the elements and walked by our foggy cemetery told us how “cool” our house was and how we did such an awesome job working on it. I told them “thank you,” but what I was really thinking was, “Uh, duh?! Where did you think you were trick-or-treating?”

On a side note, I want to point out that last year very few people participated in any Halloween festivities in the neighborhood. This discouraged us and we were pretty disappointed in our neighbors’ lack of spirit. This year, a new family arrived on the scene, placing a small cemetery in their flower bed complete with emerging zombie and spider webs on their porch. A couple with such distaste for the lack of participation last year should be thrilled – and we were – but we also talked smack about them every time we passed their house, figuring their zombie would come to our house because we had a much, much better cemetery.

Today was day-after-Halloween shopping and we spent probably $250 on Halloween stuff – therefore about $500 worth. It’s been a great year for scares!

I have a slew of photos but because of their size, I don’t want to upload them all to my free WordPress blog. I’ll link to them, though, here.