Final Halloween preparations...

Boo. Things are looking a little different here on Tales of the Rambling Redhead. Fear not, this isn't going to be a static design. Being the geek that I am, I needed yet another way to honour my favourite day of the year...HALLOWEEN!

Only one more day before the candy-grabbers come and the haunting commences. While the inside of our home is pretty much back to normal, I have now turned my attention to creepifying our front lawn and creating a ghoulish scene that’s sure to frighten the children….mwahahaha!

Because our house is small to begin with, and not nearly large enough to accommodate my elaborate decor, hubby has wisely set down the annual "prop-buying" ground rule of only one purchase per year. As a result, I have become fairly creative with my displays, often using things that are found around the house.

Last year I built a half body to crush under the garage door. I stuffed an old pair of jeans with some leftover deck wood and paper, added a pair of boots for the feet and voila! We left the legs sticking out under a partially closed garage door and backlit the scene with a red flood light. Despite all the prefabricated ghosts and tombstones on our lawn, I think the children liked my homemade display the most…go figure.

In addition to the garage dummy, this year hubs and I decided to make another set of legs to hang out the window of our second story guest room. Thank goodness I own several pairs of jeans because, once again, I found myself stuffing pants….what else is a gal to do at 10 pm on a work night? Actually, the dummy was very easy to assemble and I managed to whip it up in only ten minutes. To keep the weight down, I decided to forego attaching boots to the legs; instead I stuffed some of hubby’s gym socks to form feet and I sewed them to the inside of the ankles in the jeans. I then stuffed the jean legs with garbage bags to give them shape – very simple and yet very realistic! The only setup required tomorrow evening is removing the screen from the window, dangling the legs out and sliding the window pane back down on top of the jean waist to hold the dummy in place. We had a few spare red lights leftover from last weekend’s party, so I swapped out the regular lights in our spare room to cast a creepy glow out the window and draw peoples’ attention to the hanging legs. Genius or madness? You decide…

The other usual suspects will be part of our ‘haunting’ this year: ghosts, cobwebs, glowing footsteps, creepy music, warning signs, pumpkin reaper (from Halloween party), etc. We decided to improve the tombstones this year by fortifying them with larger wooden stakes and hope to backlight them with a red floodlight and a smoke/fog machine. Last year we had the fog machine on our front porch but the strong wind kept blowing the smoke in through our front window and door - these things are a learning experience…

The only slight degeneration this year is the fact that we only managed to carve four pumpkins; we carved six back in 2006 for our first Halloween. I do, however, think that the other improvements far supersede the Jack-O-Lantern issue, and besides these pumpkins are huge! (yet another way we passed out time last evening.)

Wish us luck folks. It is always our goal to be the best house on the street. The only foreseeable detriment to our success is the fact that hubs and I can’t seem to prevent ourselves from eating all the candy for the children!