Tomorrow marks the start of the official “spooky season” here at the Smay farm. My Bean and I love everything Halloween-related. We love spooky stories. Every night before we go to bed, we take turns reading several chapters from one of her young adult literature horror novels. We find these stories are the perfect amount of scary. There isn’t anything too frightening, but it’s creepy enough to make you run from the bathroom to the bedroom and jump into bed just in case something grabs your feet from under the bed. We just finished The Girl in the Locked Room by Mary Downing Hahn. If you have a little ghoul between the ages of nine and twelve, this is a great spooky tale.
We also have a list of Halloween movies we will watch over the course of the month, beginning with Hocus Pocus. I do The Thirteen Days of Halloween with my bean, and she loves it. When I give her her treat or introduce an activity, I always sing “It’s the Thirteen Days of Halloween” in a deep voice and do a little pirate jig. The bean rolls her eyes at my dancing, but it makes me giggle. The Thirteen Days of Halloween is like the Twelve Days of Christmas, but it’s Halloween-related. Celebrating the thirteen days of Halloween is a fun little tradition we started last year to break up the monotony of quarantine. We enjoyed it so much; we are going to keep up the tradition. We do a Halloween activity, watch a movie, or she receives a small Halloween-related gift. For this Halloween season, I am going to present her with a copy of one of my favorite scary movies, The Lost Boys. The bean loves everything eighties related so this will thrill her to no end. We’re also going on a cemetery walk at an old local cemetery. The cemetery walk will incorporate her love of history with a bit of haunted folklore. I also plan to add to her growing collection of sci-fi make-up. I believe I am just as excited for The Thirteen Days of Halloween as she.
This weekend, we will pull out our multiple storage totes of Halloween décor. I like vintage Halloween décor; we don’t do creepy or gory. We love to create little seasonal vignettes around the house. However, I do plan to scale back my decorating just a bit. It’s so exciting to pull out all the decorations but lugging them back up the stairs to the attic to put them away is a task no one enjoys. Doing this is also keeping my pair down, scale back, and minimize goal achievable. I believe my bean is going to have an issue with donating my unwanted decorations. She loves to keep everything, my little packrat.
What Halloween traditions do you practice? I would love to read your ideas, so please feel free to respond in the comments. Reading your comments makes me feel more connected, and I love to share ideas. As always, dear reader, stay safe, be smart, enjoy the “spooky season,” and keep washing your hands. Germs are genuinely scary, no ha-ha.