I like Halloween - I really like Halloween

Halloween is my favorite holiday of the year.  I'm sure as a kid I'd have told you it was Christmas and I was probably right but Halloween was a close second.  As I've grown Halloween jumped to #1.  I love everything about it.  The scary scenes like the above, the costumes, the movies, the visuals, the music, the feel of being scared, the candy, everything.  This year I had wanted to post for the 31 days of October.  I got the idea from Erick's Wonderful Wonderblog.  You can see this year's post concerning the Countdown to Halloween here which is annual drive put on by another site.  I'm actually out of town for a bit so for now I'm going to say I'll do it next year.   

As a kid I always dressed up.  Maybe it was a football player, in a homemade wolfman outfit or any of the kind you buy at the store.  Didn't matter.  Just looking forward to picking out my costume was great.  I also loved going to the Halloween fairs they had at school.  I would even trick or treat and I even remember trick or treating on my own as I got older.  Not something you'd do today.  I also remember getting homemade candied apples.  Homemade food is also taboo today.  I even stuffed a shirt and pants and put them in our front yard once.  I also had recorded scary sounds on a cassette tape.  I had no way to remotely play the sounds and it didn't run long so I'd run outside every time I saw someone coming to hit play on the old school cassette player.  I was probably was in my mid teens at the time and I'll never forget how much fun that was.

One thing that I always looked forward to around Halloween were the Halloween TV shows and movies.  In the 70's and early eighties this would be The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, Mad Monster Party, the universal monster's big three (Dracula, Frankenstein, Wolfman), among many others.  One of my first posts here was on my favorite horror movies.  This part of Halloween was always better than Christmas.  I cut my teeth on all the great black and white movies that scared me to death and slowly graduated to Halloween, The Fog, right up to current greats such as the original Scream and Rob Zombie's Halloween.  There are too many to name here but needless to say I could go on and on.  Being scared by a movie or show is something I always look forward too. 

Halloween is also something I've always enjoyed with my youngins.  Passing on the love of Halloween is great.  My kids would tell you they've seen Mad Monster Party way too many times. Still it is great to see them enjoy something that I've had so much fun with throughout the years.  The older kids still at home love to dress up and hand out candy and the wife loves making up all the cool Halloween treats for everyone to enjoy.  We all enjoy seeing the great costumes of kids and how they react to the pumpkins we carved and have put outside the house.  My wife is someone whose interests lend itself to the ghost hunting side of the genre and she was into long before it came into vogue.  We'll go on what we like to call jaunts and I'll share some of those this month in future posts.

Halloween always seems to bring out the fun in folks. We always love talking about everything the season brings.   I'm in the military and one of the things I enjoy every year is our Halloween run and costume contest.  We run a 5K in costume followed by the contest.  I am in communications, which is a career field filled with nerds, and historically we've done very well with costumes.  Just two years ago they took first and second with a group from Futurama as well as Rick Astley.  One more thing to make me look forward to ictober and all it brings.  I look forward to the upcoming season and I hope you have a fun and scary Halloween.