Halloween Die-ary #12
It’s the one day of the year you don’t have to check the
calendar. You can feel the date in your skeleton bones. October 1. Still,
what a magical calendar square. Up there with December 24 and, well, probably
no other date in the entire year for its potential, for its promise, for its anticipatory
glee. Also, time for me to move the Devil to the top of The Nightmare Before
Christmas calendar again. By the way, when I filmed that clip two years ago
during the 2018 OTIS Halloween Season, that calendar was on my office wall. Now
that room is the baby’s nursery, and the calendar stayed there instead of
moving with me to my basement office.
Meanwhile, Instagram sent me a “memory” from five years ago, which turned out to be the first photo we took during the first day of the Salem stay that would result in A Season with the Witch. The image? Me eating a Halloween Whopper.
So many Halloween memories.
Speaking of which, you are reading my 540th OTIS Halloween Season
post since we hacked off the top of this jack-o-lantern in 2010. That…is skull-boggling
to me. Also, I think those 540 posts combine into the entirety of my last will
and testament. Halloween gets it all.
For those of you who have put off swinging by OTIS because you don’t like your Halloween in September (totally understandable), you have a lot of catching up to do. But I’ve made it easy. I’ve gathered all of September’s posts together on the OTIS Halloween page (the same page where you can see the entire archive of 540 Halloween Season posts). Eventually all of October 2020 will go there, too. And then I’ll call up the page some sun-searing day in June when I’m pining for cool nights and spooky fonts and orange glows. But not today. I don’t need to pine for it. We’re deep in that melee. Let me illustrate with what we did today. Actually, what we did in a mere evening, since I worked all day.
We turned on all the Halloween decorations and watched Alvin and the Chipmunks meet Frankenstein while we ate dinner, and then we played Halloween Twister (all thanks to Kelly, an OTIS Club member who sent me the game and to whom I owe a life debt for how much fun we all had with it).
After the
kids went to bed, Lindsey and I made caramel apple martinis and watched Cyndi
Lauper, Jeff Goldblum, and Peter Faulk in Vibes (not a Halloween movie,
but I had to see this oddball comedy from 1988 about psychics chasing treasure
in Ecuador before my October viewing started in earnest. It’s on Amazon Prime
for anybody interested). Then we moved on to a Halloween episode of Community
and then caught 15 minutes of Hocus Pocus playing on Freeform (the
Halloween party scene). We also watched the first episode of Boston Common
on YouTube, but the reason behind that is too complicated and random to go into
here.
I finished the night writing this post, but not before I
planned a road trip to Vermont for Saturday and a possible return to Salem on
Sunday.
I mean, October 1, folks.
Oh, and remind me to text my brother tomorrow. It’s his birthday.
