Party City, Pumpkin Stencils and Halloween

Source: http://blog.al.com/breaking/2007/10/pumpkin.jpg

This past weekend, I found myself making the annual pilgrimage to the local Party City, that store where every aisle is festooned with Halloween decorations, gleaming goblin eyes glowing crimson, stacks of red gore, and 14 to 25 year olds seeking the right maid or she-devil costume that will...well, never mind (it's disturbing, even for Halloween).

As we shuffled like zombies--the only method of perambulation possible since we were hemmed in on either side by the walking dead, other parents mindlessly trying to get what they needed and begone--through the crowd, my son spotted a Star Wars Clone Trooper costume. "I want that one!" he cried. We dutifully marched to the young man in Party City attire, and gave him our order, which he wrote down and radioed in to the back room, a convincing display of communications technology. Ah, if only the Party City people were had the group mind portrayed in the zombie movies, service might be more efficient. However, it didn't matter. They did just fine. In the end, my son ended up being an ice wolf ninja, not a clone trooper.

The next step was to find a bucket to carry all the candy my young ninja will get but won't eat for fear of the crazy predator that has laced candy with razor blades, drugs and fear. Though we offered him several choices, this Halloween he will bear, not the traditional plastic pumpkin bucket but instead, a ghostly glow in the dark bucket. The ninja will be invisible, but you'll see the bucket coming.

I've long since given up doing pumpkin carvings. Halloween stencils don't work for me, a person who is lousy at arts-n-crafts dexterity requires.

What will Halloween look like for you?

Note: Hard to believe, but I wrote this blog entry as a way of tweaking the nose of search engine optimization...and, sad to say, that experiment succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. In fact, this blog entry is MORE popular and gets MORE hits annually than any single other blog entry I've written as long as I've been blogging on Blogger.com. Amazing, huh?

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