Category: Holiday

Happy Halloween

  • November 1, 2025

Yesterday was Halloween, and for the second year in a row we went to Jessica’s place since our neighborhood seems to have aged out of kids and hers is the exact opposite.

Decorations this year feel muted compared to previous years, and I imagine this is because of the economy. The giant skeletons and inflatables (shown above in the front yard of a house near us) in particular are very expensive and a non trivial investment for once-a-year use.

The house just down the street wasn’t daunted though, continuing with their habit of custom-made lawn decorations. Here we have a skeletal Beetlejuice with the sandworm (from the films) and yes it’s as big as it looks. A vast amount of effort went into this creation.

That’s my work Halloween ‘outfit’ – a $5 Twilight shirt from Five Below. I imagined the shirt would be a bit dated for my students but that wasn’t the case and I got a few asking why I didn’t have on a Jacob shirt 🙂

Upon arrival at Jessica’s she revealed she had (accidentally?) purchased two copies of this ghost cat shirt, one of which was gifted to me, so I suppose I had two ‘outfits’ this year.

We got a lot of kids. I kept count actually, and more than 175 knocked on Jessica’s door. We had about 600 pieces of candy so we were well-prepared, but for about an hour they came thick and fast and it was hectic keeping up with them!

For obvious reasons I don’t photograph the kids, but I made an exception for the above since it was an adult and since she claimed to have made the entire outfit (of a character from the horror game Five Nights At Freddy’s) herself.

Amongst children who wore costumes (about 90% of them) the five most popular (in order) were princesses, skeletons, spidermen, ninja and clowns. Runners up (with more than a single examples each) included witches, K-Pop Demon Hunters, Ghostface (from Scream), Harry Potter, black cats, Minecraft, cheerleaders, Bluey, bananas, soccer players, Chucky, the clown from Terrifier, ballerinas, Vampire Diaries, basketball players, Fortnite and Disney characters.

And lastly there were dozens of costumes only represented by a single child, including Captain Hook, Taylor Swift, a ghost, Reed Richards, an explorer, a pilot, a race car driver, a rocket, Michael Myers, a robot, a taco, a demon, the Grim Reaper, a bee, a ladybug, a deer, a doctor, red-riding hood, a ghillie suit, Skibidi Toilet, a murderer, Barbie, a flower, a bat, Princess Leia, an M&M, Freaky Friday, a devil, the Winter Soldier, Iron Man, a gingerbread man, a crazy cat lady and two dozen or so other characters I couldn’t identify.

In short, a fun night.

That’s the house just across from Jessica’s and they go all out with the yard with projectors and animated lights. They counted kids as well and got 207, and even though they are literally across the street the reason they got 20% more is that all these lights are irresistible for 5 year olds hunting for candy so they walk right past Jessica’s!

Maybe next year we’ll put a few lights up in her yard…

  • Posted in Holiday
  • Robert

Halloween Decorations

  • October 29, 2024

Halloween decorations seem to have increased both in frequency and size this year. We went for a walk the other day to admire some of them. Here’s some photos.

Many houses that decorate will have pumpkins on their porch, perhaps a few little ghosts hanging from a tree, and maybe a skeletons or skull in their window. This house went all-in with a full-sized skeleton and a gigantic spider web that spans their entire front yard. This isn’t even the biggest web near us: another house covered almost the entire front of the house with a massive web!

This one is a bit low effort but made us laugh: (rubber) body parts scattered on the lawn. On a dark night I think this could be quite scary for a young child, which I feel is in the ‘true’ spirit of Halloween

Just down the street from us they built a small graveyard in their yard which looks great amongst the fallen leaves. As you can see the dead are escaping and climbing a nearby tree. This is illuminated with spooky red lights at night and looks great.

The place around the corner has two massive inflatables (one is Hogwarts!), a looming skeleton with animated eyes and dozens of smaller statues all throughout the yard. Trick-or-treaters will walk through the purple house on their way to the front door. All this is lit at night and accompanied by spooky music.

The place down the road that did tennis playing skeletons years ago now have an incredible Ghostbusters scene. The backpacks and ‘slimer’ ghost are all homemade from cardboard and styrofoam and (we think) the beams light up at night. This is amazingly well done and the sort of display that could win a Halloween decoration contest!

A few blocks away, in front of a house that looks like it could legitimately be haunted, are the biggest decorations we’ve ever seen. Jack Skellington here is 13 feet tall (I checked!) and animated, and only one of five different enormous statues they have in their front yard.

This demon has light-up eyes and towers over me. It’s legitimately creepy and I imagine kids will love it.

And as you can see this headless horseman is almost life-sized as well. I checked online to find a price and there seems to be a few different similar models but even the cheapest is almost $400. And this is just one of five in this houses front yard!

Inflatables remain common, but perhaps not as much as they used to be. Here’s the display in front of our fire station, which as usual will have a haunted house installation this year for parents to take their kids to on Halloween. I like the sausage dog, with a sign (‘Happy Halloweiner‘) that seems removable so he can remain out with his pilgrim hat on as a thanksgiving ornament.

And what of us? It’s been several years since we out any non-pumpkin decorations out, but we splurged this year on our first ever set of lawn flamingos! Of the zombie kind…

Here they are installed next to the creepy face on the tree in our front yard. They’re black with blood red eyes and long sharp teeth, and probably should have been marketed as vampires and not zombies!

And here they are at night, basking in the glow from that demonic face. We won’t be home on Halloween night, but I hope at least one young trick-or-treater sees this and is momentarily spooked 🙂

Fireworks Shopping

  • July 2, 2023

These past two weekends we’ve driven interstate (to PA and NH) to buy fireworks for our annual backyard (in Rochester) celebration. As always, it’s a lot of fun seeing the variety of product available and imaging the fun of setting it off.

The above – 16000 little firecrackers (what we used to call ‘crazy jacks’ in my youth) – is about as big as the wheel on your typical car. Imagine the noise and smoke as this thing went off. Wouldn’t it be incredible?

And the above – an $860 assortment – is 60 shells that would produce effects similar to what you’d see at a professional show. It still amazes me that in some states you can just buy this stuff and let it off in your backyard. While we bought a few launching fireworks, they’re very tame and neither go high or produce much noise.

Speaking of noise: 750 missiles! This thing takes more than two minutes to fire all the missiles, and each missile whistles and then bangs in the air. While it would be spectacular, I imagine this would be the sort of thing that may have the neighbors calling the rozzers in our suburb (since these sorts of things are currently illegal in our county).

The packaging of the bigger fireworks is always wonderful, and here I focus on a few of the genre ones (although in 2023 a reference to the ‘Majestic 12’ is a bit esoteric). Here’s a few others:

Can you spot the blatant copyright infringement on two of the above? If it’s not obvious, here’s some that is:

The label designer obviously have fun with these products (which, remember, are designed to be set on fire), and every now and then there are head-scratching examples like this one:

We bought a bunch of items from several shops, and our ‘show’ promises to be a good one. At Joyce’s request we tried to only buy low-noise fireworks, and that included this selection of fountains we’ve got:

We’ve had one or two low noise fountains before (they mostly make a low hiss due to the sparks coming out) so it will be interesting seeing what these are like.

That said it’s possible that some of the fountains we got may make a few crackles, but for obvious reasons how could we pass on…

…a skull and a spinning snake?!? Imagine if such things had been available when we were kids?

I also can’t resist a good sword (handheld fountains, basically) and you know there was no chance I’d pass up this lightsaber firework!

And this is just a selection of what we’ll be lighting up on Tuesday. As usual I’ll try to catch the excitement in pictures and maybe video and follow up later in the week 🙂