It's HALLOWEEN Week!

Several years ago, at our old house, I innocently bought a few ghosts to hang in our front yard tree.

Little was I to know just what I had started.

Donald and Heidi came home from school that day and saw those ghosts. It just kind of snowballed from there.

It was a general consensus that while those three hanging ghosts were quite wonderful, they needed a bit more company.I headed to my sewing room. I got a large piece of plain white fabric, and we made several more ghosts to add to the tree.

I've searched my "archives" (several white, three ring binders) for pictures of those ghosts in the tree and so far I've come up empty. Too bad my DIL Lisa wasn't around back then. She takes picture after picture of anything and everything.

Well, by the time those ghosts were all hung we had given birth to many, many more ideas for our yard.

It was unanimous that a tree with hanging ghosts simply wasn't going to be enough.

We needed a graveyard.

The next day I went to Walmart and purchased several slabs of white styrofoam. Then I went to the spray paint aisle. I bought a couple cans of, very expensive, faux concrete look, grey.

This was at the height of all of those faux-finish ideas for walls and other surfaces you see.

It took a while (and a trip back to Walmart for more cans of the fake concrete stuff) but by that evening we had one heck of an old haunted cemetery in our front yard.

We were HOOKED!

From there, of course, we had to have a fake, dead and bloody man, take up residence in one of our lawn chairs.

We then decided that a coffin with a skeleton in it was simply a must!

The final touch was a table sporting a lovely white table cloth featuring a plate holding a bloody head.

My siblings, for years, had had a beauty school, women's practice head, sitting around building up dust.
Her name was Donna.

I don't quite remember how we came into possession of her (my best guess would be my sister Janice who lived about a mile up the street from us at the time.)

So Donna had the honor of being our bloody head on the plate.

Oh yeah, that was also when those bags of white semi-realistic looking spider webs became available.

I bought several bags of them.

Well, I guess it's not really necessary for me to point out that in the course of three days we went from,

your usual carved pumpkins by the front door and perhaps a few paper bats taped to the window, house.

To the COOLEST HALLOWEEN HOUSE for MILES AROUND!!!!!!!

There was only one small problem.

Courtney,

my youngest,

who was,
I think
5 or 6 at the time
was terrified of the entire yard.

That did put a small damper on things.

We kept everything up though. (I mean, after all that work? Wouldn't you???)
We just devised a system where we had her shut her eyes every time she went outside.

It really wasn't as bad as it sounds.

Really.

She didn't even have to be reminded.

The minute she even heard that front door open she had her hands over her eyes.

A FUN FACT;

Courtney is now a huge lover of all things dark and gruesome. She even went through a goth period. And she may have left all the dark clothes far behind, but she still loves all thing Macabre.

I'm sure it goes without saying that we made quite the splash that Halloween. It was the very best Halloween that any of us had had up to that point.

We had always enjoyed the holiday but after that year, Halloween, became an all time favorite with all of us.
I will give a few more glimpses into Halloween; Sorenson style, in a few days.

In the meantime, I would love to hear about your ways of celebrating.

A little more info I forgot to mention;

You may be wondering why I didn't just go buy those gravestones.

I couldn't because they didn't sell them back then. It was two years after that year that they first started appearing in the stores. Good thing too. By then my home made ones were on their last leg. I still think that somehow those companies owe me royalties for having the idea first.