Brandon Notices

I thought I would take some time to point out more Halloween decorations I've put up around the house.

This is a ghost I found at Value Village for the very affordable price of $5. The fabric ghosts hangs freely from the rusty-looking structure, and it blows in the wind, which is totally awesome. What's kinda sucky is that the ghost sometimes loops over the top and gets stuck, so I regularly have to unravel it.

Speaking of ghosts, I noticed a few days ago that the garbage bag ghost the neighbors and I put up has fallen down. It looks like the string ripped itself from the bag. This probably happened during a wind storm we had. I took the ghost and hid it in my yard so that hooligans don't run off with it.

This is something new I made this year. I got the idea online, and I have dubbed these cut-up garbage bags "Spooky Streamers". (I want to point out that I have a habit of using the word "spooky" as an adjective to describe things having to do with Halloween, such as Spooky Cat. I think I use "spooky" like this because the Halloween items in one of my favorite video games, Animal Crossing, were prefixed with "spooky".) The Spooky Streamers look really good when a fan blows on them, or when someone passes by them, because they swoosh around, and the light glimmers on them.

And what have we got here? Spooky Lights. Last year, we had three strings of Halloween lights: one in orange, one in green, and one in purple. We had them taped up in three different windows, which looked great from outside, but I decided to do something different this year. I pulled all the bulbs from the strings, and combined them into three strings each with all three colors in a pattern. It's very colorful, and for some reason, this color combination reminds me of candy. I've strung these strings around the living room. This is in lieu of a Spooky Chain, which is what I made last year. The Spooky Chain was a chain made by stapling orange and black construction paper links together.

Here, we have the leaf garlands. Garth is playing in them! He kept trying to eat the plastic coiled stems. These decorations are unique because they also stay out through November—they match the Thanksgiving decorations too. For the longest time, these decorations seemed to be lost in the garage, but I finally found them. They were in an unmarked paper grocery bag, shoved in with the sports equipment. I chanced upon them by accident this afternoon, which is really annoying, because I must have spent more than an hour determinedly searching for them earlier this month.

In celebration of the Halloween spirit, a spider has set up a new web site outside the window near the back porch. Not that I'm really afraid of spiders, but I don't think I would ever have gotten this close to a spider without a pane of glass between us.

I noticed today that my digital cable's Music Choice channel, Sounds of the Seasons, has finally begun playing Halloween music. Up until recently, they've been playing Oktoberfest music, which is a real letdown when what you really want is Halloween tunes. Last year, Music Choice made the decision of ending the Halloween music at the unfortunate time of 9:30 PM on Halloween (it was 12:30 AM the next day on the East Coast, where Music Choice is based). It was a little aggravating to suddenly hear the Jackson 5 sing Santa Claus is Coming to Town—it ruined the Halloween spirit. Seriously, do they expect people to crank up the Christmas music at 12:30 AM on November 1st? I hope Music Choice heeds the advice I gave them and holds off on the Christmas music for a few hours more.