The 31 Days of Halloween(minus 4)

I'd actually thought about doing a month-long marathon of blog posts in honor of Halloween a couple of weeks ago. It's something I attempted a couple years ago, but for various reasons did not follow through with. I attribute it to a combination of my general tendency towards procrastination and my tendency to overthink my blog posts into a state of incoherence. But then the first came, and went, and the second came and went, then of course the third and fourth followed, as they are wont to do, and still no post. But here we are, on the evening of the 5th, and I'm finally posting my first blog of the month with the stated intent to fill out the remainder of the month with daily posts. What changed? What prompted my decision to commit to this? A visit to my old friend Rik's blog, where I see he's taking part in the Countdown to Halloween, and suddenly my interests were once again piqued.

Halloween has long been my favorite holiday, although over the past few years it's been missing the magic I remember from my childhood years. I would try to recapture that childhood feeling of warm, comforting creepiness here and there, by making annual Halloween playlists to take into work(Rhino's Brain In A Box set helped immeasurably in that regard), I would invite people over for horror movie marathons, and I'd go out of my way to rewatch old favorites. But something was missing, and I think it's finally starting to come back.

My daughter is 6 now, and she's reached that age where Halloween is something she proactively takes an interest in, beyond just getting candy. She plans her costumes almost a year in advance, and has recently taken an interest in 'scary' movies. Now, I'm not about to start showing her the Saw movies, or John Carpenter's The Thing(although, come to think of it, I was YOUNGER than her when I first saw that one), but we've already had some Godzilla marathons(starting with the original, and then moving on to some of the more recent action-fests), and she's watched some of the old Universal classics with me. So this year I've decided to go out of my way to make Halloween as special as it was when I was a kid, staying up late to watch the horror movies that populated the after-midnight scheduling of all local channels. We may not watch a scary movie every night, and probably wont, but I'm planning on squeezing in as many we can over the next 27 days.

I plan on, starting tomorrow, filling this blog out with some of my favorite things about Halloween, some spooky true stories, and a running guide of what I'm introducing my daughter to, along with some of her thoughts on them. All this and some lists to program some killer Halloween marathons and, of course, ideas for your next mixtape. Stay tuned as I try to recapture that Halloween magic.