Creepmas Day 1: Halloween! (Finally)

So this year I'm celebrating Creepmas! It was actually inspired by a gift someone recently sent to me (more on the specifics tomorrow) that made me realize I had a sort of collection that would lend itself to this sort of celebration. So here we are! 

From the 13 Days of Creepmas website: 

"A reaction to the continuing incursion of Christmas into Autumn and Halloween, CREEPMAS is a good-natured chance for Halloween lovers to exact revenge by bringing some spooky good cheer into the holidays or, more appropriately, the Hallowdays..." Read more about the inspirations behind this 13 day celebration HERE. 

I'm totally going to pretend like my intent all along was to share our Halloween night as a part of my Creepmas celebration. (NOT what actually happened: which was I got lazy and decided to take a break for all of November this year.) So here we go. 

So we went with a theme this year: Mario Brothers! That's me dressed as Bowser, my wife as Toadstool, and my two sons are Luigi and Mario. My daughter was supposed to go as Princess PEach but couldn't find a frilly, pink dress before Halloween and so decided she wasn't going with us. AND THEN at the last moment she threw on some black clothes and painted on some whiskers and called herself a cat. She tried to justify this by citing the new Super Mario Brothers 3D having cat-suits for all the characters... but I was having none of that. We allowed her to join us... but we made it very clear to all in earshot that she was not "one of us" (gooba-gobba). It should be pointed out that ALL of the costumes are just clothes we modified. My wife bought a blue t-shirt at Goodwill, cut off the arms, slit it down the middle, glued on some gold ribbon, and voila! a vest.

Here we are on Ledgelawn Ave. in Bar Harbor, ME. We go out there every year because it is the most traditional suburban-ish neighborhood that you can take your kids trick-or-treating through in our part of Maine. We LOVE it. It feels like you're wandering through a Halloween episode of a classic TV series or something. It FEELS like Halloween should feel.

There are always some great costumes on display. This girl dressed up as popcorn was no exception.

I also thought this Cleopatra handing out candy did a nice job with some very simple accoutrements.

Our kids were certainly not the only Mario Brothers in attendance... 

As we discovered a few different times.

There was even a Yoshi wandering around, and more than one Minecraft inspired costume as well. There were more Steves, and Creepers, and Endermen than you could shake a pixellated stick at!

I genuinely applaud both the inherent creepiness and obvious laziness of this guys bloody bunny "costume".

There was even a car dressed up! At least I THINK it was for Halloween. Some of it anyway. Okay... probably just the spider webs actually.

There was more than one Church out in force, handing out goodies. A trend amongst the three different Churches we passed were doughnuts. There were optional warm beverages as well, one serving hot chocolate, one serving apple cider, and this one was serving coffee for the grown-ups.

LOVED this particular house. LOTS of awesome decorations honestly, but most of my pictures came out for crap due to the dark and the quality of our camera. There was even one house projecting Michael Jackson's "Thriller" video on a big sheet on the side of their house. I didn't even bother trying to get a picture of that.

 Really liked this jelly-fish costumes as well.

But the prize (in my opinion) goes to this guy who dressed up as a fridge with a severed head in the freezer. It's the details like the pint of ice cream and the fridge magnets that really make me love this man.

This same table is set up every single year, and my youngest son refuses to approach it every single year because of the head in the plastic bubble. It talks and lights up and just generally frightens the pee out of him. My older son let NOTHING frighten him out of getting candy this year. He admitted to being spooked later on, but told us he knew everything was fake and couldn't hurt him and... hey. Candy.

Every year when we arrive home, the kids discover a little pail of goodies has been left behind by the Great Pumpkin. My children are wise and know that the Great Pumpkin will not come if you stay up and wait for him in the pumpkin patch. Much like Santa, he only comes if you are doing what you are SUPPOSED to be doing on the Holiday in question. Santa = Go to sleep! Great Pumpkin = Go get Candy!

I swear we were not holding this child hostage and screaming at him to smile so his parents would know he was doing okay. This is my own son and he was smiling like this just because he was smiling like this. The picture of Mario tacked to the bed is always there. The boys really are obsessed with their respective "brothers". The eldest loves Luigi and the youngest loves Mario.

My daughter got a bowl full of reduced-price horror-FX make-up appliances because the Great Pumpkin is smart enough to make one last check to see if any of the stores have put their Halloween stuff on clearance the day OF Halloween.

Then we did the "Big Candy Count" which we do every year. My eldest son got more candy than my youngest because he was willing to go to the really spooky houses when my youngest was not. At first my wife or my daughter would go up and retrieve candy for him at the houses he was too scared to approach. But this quickly faded into: "You don't want to go to this one? Okay... moving on then," which was fine with everyone involved. I think the final counts were somewhere around 83 pieces for Luigi and 72 for Mario.

So overall, it was an awesome Halloween night. I was sad to see it go, but not as sad as I have been in some years past. I really had a blast blogging up to Halloween this year, although I think next year I will dedicate the entire month to ONLY Halloween purchases, and then drop posts about other stuff I've found later on after October is done.

Happy 13 days of Creepmas! I'll be back tomorrow with another entry in the countdown, which may or may not involve a Goodwill Goody! Until then, Happy Hunting!