Countdown to Halloween Day 29: Jack O' Lanterns!

Hey there everyone! Tonight I thought I would share one of the most treasured traditions of the Goodwill Geek's household. Jack O' Lantern carving night! We don't go all that fancy around these parts, simply picking out five pumpkins from Walmart... but it doesn't matter if the pumpkins came directly from the patch itself or simply from a shelf at the store... we make magic with them either way. 

Here's my oldest son going through the planning phase of his pumpkin.

Here's my youngest son. I have no idea what the deal is with this face he's making. The boys were SO excited to get started on their Jack O' Lanterns this year though! As soon as I came home with the pumpkins, they both helped me carry them in from the car and started begging to carve them out IMMEDIATELY. We had to wait a bit before we got started... so you can imagine it a bit of an agony for them.

I could watch this kid make faces while cleaning out his pumpkin ALL DAY. The dry heaving, the whining about how slimy it is... this is as much a part of the tradition, and my delight, as the pumpkins themselves every year.

Mwuah-Ha-Ha!!!

Here I am taking the top off my youngest son's pumpkin. He is just SHAKING with anticipation at this point. I realize you can't hear it, but we've got Halloween tunes cranking in the background.

My youngest son is way more willing to scoop the guts out of his pumpkin than the older one. Look at those faces!

A pumpkin in the process of being emptied out. Tools of the trade all around.

Then my daughter got into the action. She was very secretive about her design at first, but she's always willing to get her hands dirty when it comes to pumpkin guts.

I just love watching them all at work.

Now my wife's getting into the the action, working on her pumpkin design. Of course, my favorite thing in this picture is my older son's face. HAHAHA!

Bowls of guts all around (to pick out seeds for later...) we see the process of a pumpkin becoming a Jack O' Lantern.

This is the first year we've let the boys cut their own pumpkins, and they were SO proud and excited!

This is the most quiet and focused I have ever seen my youngest son before. It was almost eerie.

My daughter's design finally revealed... Oogie Boogie!

Here is my oldest son's Jack O' Lantern.

Here is my youngest's. I was very impressed with his work.

Here is mine! I love his big toothy grin.

Oogie Boogie came out amazingly well!

And my wife decided on the Chesire Cat, as a preview for her Halloween costume this year!

Here they are, lined up on the autumn-y porch. 

The lighting ceremony. The Jack O' Lanterns look almost as excited to be lit as the kids are to see them being lit!

Oogie Boogie looks even better lit up in the night.

This one just looks agonized and spooky in the dark!

I still think my youngest son's may be my favorite this year!

I like my pumpkin's grin lit from within even better!

The Chesire Cat looks even loonier!

And here they all are, lined up and grinning together on our porch in the night!

And of course, it isn't a proper jack o' lantern carving session without roasted pumpkin seeds afterwards! 

That's it for tonight kids! I'll be back soon with some more Grave Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting!

Countdown to Halloween Day 6: Bendy Skeletons and Aargh!

Welcome back! It's day six of the Countdown to Halloween! Today let's take a look at a haul I brought home from the official Halloween section at Goodwill. 

Here's the usual "look at my pile" shot. But let's dig in and take a closer look, shall we?

One of the cutest finds in this lot is this lady right here. At Christmas the Goodwill Geek family likes to collect Nutcrackers. We pick up at least one new Christmas nutcracker per year. Well, we also own a Mummy nutcracker that we display for Halloween and THIS year he has a lady friend!

We also like to set up a sort of Halloween village on one of our bookshelves, and these two pieces will go very nicely in there! (Ever notice how a lot of modern Halloween decorations are basicaly just bastardized Christmas decorations? Nutcrackers? Christmas Villages? But Who Wore It Best?)

These bendy figures were MUST haves. The skeleton on the left is beautiful. He is the most absolutely perfect bendy skeleton I have ever seen. I am so happy he's mine now. And this sassy little pumpkin guy is pretty rad too. They've both got a lot of panache.

Only a couple of masks really spoke to me out of the ones available to choose from. I'm not entirely sure what the lady on the left is supposed to be exactly, but she's eerie and beautiful and sort of gypsy-ish but also kind of flapper-ish... It's probably just suposed to be some sort of unsettling "The Strangers" style mask... but I liked it. And this eye guy! Man! I love a guy with 6 eyes (or 8 if you count to two eye holes for your actual eyes)!

I found a couple of Halloween-y books in "Ghoulish Gags & Giggles" by Phil Hirsch, and "Running With the Demon" by Terry Brooks. Ghoulish Gags is the typical monster-themed joke book fare, pretty tame and mostly lame, but it did give my kids a couple of chuckles. Running is a sort of urban fantasy tale, written by the Shannara guy, it was released back in 1998 and I've been semi-pseudo-aware of it since way back then, and just never pulled the trigger.

Now! On to my two favorite finds of this trip! This guy. THIS GUY. I have been TRYING to find information about this on the internet since picking him up. I've posted pleas for information on Facebook and on Instagram. I've consulted the toy guys that know toys, the monster guys that know monsters... Aaaand nothing. This fella has a soft, stuffed body  with a bendable wire frame inside. His hands, feet, and skull are all made of hard plastic. He's carrying a Trick or Treat sack that may or may not be his originally.

I am completely willing to concede that this may be some sort of DIY handmade job from a crafting/doll-making kit... if you look closely at the neck this may very well be the case. But I'd like to know one way or another. Because I LOVE THIS THING. To me, he sums up EXACTLY what Halloween should be in every way. There's that sense of nostalgia, a little sense of creepiness, a sense of whimsy... This thing has it all baby. But as amazing as this was, it isn't my #1 find of this particular trip...

THIS IS!!! This is Aargh! from the Madballs. Madballs were a line of toys that came out in the mid-80s and rocked my world. Much like Garbage Pail Kids the Madballs were a big part of the gross-out revolution of that time. They were rude and crude and had attitude. And while you may cry fowl and try to tell me that Aargh! here is in fact not a Halloween item, I challenge you to look at these faces:

And tell me how these guys with their bulging eyes, multitude of stitches and obvious bodily trauma don't SCREAM Halloween??? I found Crackhead on the far left, at Goodwill. I Found Aargh! at Goodwill. I found Slobulus, on the far right, at a yardsale. I owned exactly NONE of these characters as a kid. My favorites were Screamin' Meemie, Dust Brain, Oculus Orbus, Skull Face, Wolf Breath, and Lock Lips. I also owned some of the Super Mad Balls. I loved the comic books! I was Mad for Madballs! And I'm so happy I have managed to bring my collection up to three now!

So that's the haul I brought back from just one exciting trip to the Goodwill Halloween section!!! I can't wait to go back! I'll be back soon with more Growling Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting!

 I'm doing this countdown as a part of the official Countdown to Halloween, so be sure to pop over there and look and see who else is participating this year.

Halloween Countdown Day 10: A Very Scary Jack-O'-Lantern

So tonight I'm featuring another Halloween themed children's book. The one seems a little kitschy at first, but a few pages in and it gets pretty good! It's a book called A Very Scary Jack-O'-Lantern by Joanne Barkin, illustrated by Jody Wheeler.

I was amazed by how innocent and almost milquetoast this book appears to be at first. The jack o' lantern on the cover seems to be a pretty standard, bright, orange childish affair. But... there is so much lurking under the surface.

Seems innocent enough, again. Grandkid pestering Grandpa "Bud" with a million inane questions. Notice the basket full of nightmare fuel on the floor by the end of the side table. Almost all of those items will come into play in the coming pages. Hold onto your hats.

Grandpa Bud is a bit of a sociopath if we're really being honest. Let's see why.

All kidding aside, this is where the book starts to get good (forgetting that Grandpa Bud is encouraging his young grandson to go on a traumatizing journey alone into the night...) and the artwork feels like there's a bit more effort being put into it. Oh! And did I mention this book glows in the dark? That becomes important pretty soon here. Every page has hidden, glow-in-the-dark details that only present themselves when you snap off the light, inducing a thorough pants-soiling in this book's target audience.

So I have next-to-no way of showing you the glow-in the dark features without putting in effort that I neither genuinely feel nor really care to muster... But you can kind of make out some of the intended effects anyway. For instance. The scarecrow in this picture? Really a skeleton in the dark. That's actually pretty awesome. The book is full of guides like this black cat and the skeleton. Each time you turn the page, you are introduced to a new guide, and the old one disappears mysteriously. Love the mood and the atmosphere building because of this. I love Halloween books that celebrate the feelings and the traditions of the holiday. And this one actually does a great job of it.

This is my FAVORITE scene in the book! That text up there says it all. The skeleton/scarecrow/thing dives into a pitch-black pond that has wraith-mist-freakshow-people rising up out of it. THIS is why Grandpa Bud is pure, pure evil. Eliott needs to run away now and find a crawl-space to hide in where Grandpa can't reach him.

If this book were a rollercoaster, we would have just gone over the most exciting part, and things kind of start to settle from here on. This Halloween owl and his bat buddies are pretty awesome though. These are the scenes where the artwork really seems to shine too. Wheeler's artwork is at its weakest when portraying human figures, but strongest when dealing with these spooky landscapes and environments, and their inhuman inhabitants.

Cabin in the woods anyone? Yeah. Kinda think they're over doing it with the bear, deer, fox, and squirrel. The isolation being broken up by the bats and owls would have been sufficient. This would have been a nice place to have menacing eyes staring out of the darkness.

Inside the witch's den we have some old-faithful items like a broom, a cauldron, a dangling spider... dried flowers? a basket full of fire wood? Eh... I think we could have done better here. But we know its a witch's house. That's all that really matters.

The raven in the wicker cage is a NICE TOUCH. Actually, that whole table is full of magic coolness. But the witch looks a little bit too much like my grandmother, boots, apron, and weird, squat stance (god rest her soul. My grandmother, not the witch). She's wearing a hood but all I can think of is that she looks like the Golem from the old 1915 film:

And I can't tell if that works to her advantage or not. 

Either way, the effect is a bit ruined when we see her face. I feel like this is just a little too kindly of a witch for it being the climax of the book. She seems a little TOO friendly. Where are the misty pond wraiths and skeleton-stuffed-scarecrows now? I think this book peaked too soon. But hey! There's our cat buddy from before!

We see Eliott running for his very LIFE on this weird errand for his Grandpa "Bud", in an aerial view that reminds us of just how far we came to get this pumpkin.

An it culminates with a final shot of the titular "very scary" Jack-O'-Lantern which is okay I guess... but it's not this:

So... meh. 

All right! That's all I've got for tonight kids! I'll be back soon with more Grindhouse Goodwill Goodies! Until then, Happy Haunting!