100 Days of Halloween Happy Multiple Prompts

[spiralicious]

I have been trying to figure out how to finish this up without flooding people's reading cirlces and I think I've landed on something that will work well for me and not take over your reading circles.

While I wasn't able to post many prompts, I did write many of them out by hand to be posted later. Many of them are extremely short, but I don't like the idea of doing one post with a ton of prompts in it, especially as I have a master post prepped to link to all finished prompts when I am done. What I've decided to do instead is to put up this post. In the body of the post I will list a prompt and maybe a brief description of what I did for the prompt (ex. "craft project" or "TV show reaction"), and I will put the prompt fill in a comment on this post. That way, I can still link to individual fills on the master post, I can put up fills as I find them, and no one's reading circle gets flooded. Longer fills will still get their own posts and some fills are actually fics that will be going up on AO3 - which is why there will be a master post after I get everything posted.

However, it doesn't look like I will get all 100 prompts posted by the end of the year as I had hoped and I am thinking about not doing this challenge next year, as I have tried multiple years now and it's just too difficult for me. Makes me a little sad, but probably for the best.

Prompts Filled in Comments:
- HHday 72: Ghosts - Halloween village addition
- HHday 73: Cauldron - I have one
- HHday 76: Vampire - reaction to AMC Interview with the Vampire
- HHday 82: October Must Do
- HHday 83: Friday the 13th - How I celebrated Friday, Oct 13, 2023
- HHday 84: Candy Corn - thoughts and feelings
- HHday 86: Halloween Baking - sushi brain
- HHday 87: Pumpkin Patch - this year's pumpkins
- HHday 88: Cemetery - we went
- HHday 89: Out of This World - I have an alien head
- HHday 91: Halloween Party - Library 30th Anniversary Party
- HHday 92: Carved Pumpkins - My favorite pumpkin carving tips
- HHday 93: Sweatshirt - amazing costume base

Comments

HHday 72: Ghost

[spiralicious]

One craft I made this year to become a long term part of my Halloween village is ghost lanterns. I got a set of five mini ghost buckets and I put battery powered lights in them. Right now, they have the flickering kind in them and look okay in the cemetery set up, but I would like to try out a different set of lights.

HHday 73: Cauldron

[spiralicious]

Is anyone surprised I have a cauldron? Yes, it's real and can be cooked in. It is very small, like an extra big chili bowl. I mostly use it as a safe place to burn things. It was originally a St. Patrick's Day decoration when my mom worked at the bakery, but I don't know where it came from originally.

HHday 76: Vampire

[spiralicious]

I finally watched AMC's Interview with the Vampire. As a fan of the book & movie, I was concerned, but I am in love with it. It's both a continuation and a reboot. There are a lot of changes, like the time period, but they have captured the story so far and most of the changes make sense, and, frankly, a lot of them are for the better. I think they did a better job with casting for the TV show than the movie, especially Lestat. (I still love the movie, but Tom Cruise as Lestat never sat right with me.) This version of Claudia did take me a minute to get used to, but I love her. Even the cheesy, over the top typical AMC gore works. The twist at the end of the season finale has given me pause, but I am hopeful.

HHday 82: October Must Do

[spiralicious]

As huge as the list is of things I look forward to every October, (it is it's own post), my "must dos" are actually quite few. I've got to either hand out candy or make arrangements for it to happen. I have to buy at least one pumpkin. I must try to cram as much into the month as possible. That's kinda it.

HHday 83: Friday the 13th

[spiralicious]

I finally did it. Every time a Friday the 13th rolls around, especially in October, I try to arrange to get copies of the 1980 (original) and the 2009 (Jared Padalecki) versions of the movie and watch them back to back. I have finally pulled it off! And the librarian who processed my holds was impressed and a little jealous. Over the years, I have seen both versions multiple times. I like them, but for different reasons. If pressed, I'd say I like the 1980 version a little bit more. It even inspired a Batman AU universe of mine. I only finished one fic for it and there is a good chance I won't revisit it just because of some character relationship logistics.

It was also the first day of my (temporary) new job and I had to spend time with customer service trying to figure out why our landline still wasn't working after two weeks (It's fixed now). I'm impressed I was able to stay awake long enough to watch both movies.

HHday 84: Candy Corn

[spiralicious]

This tends to surprise people: I don't like candy corn; as candy at any rate. As an aesthetic and mascot of Halloween, I love it quite a bit. I was going to make candy corn fudge this year (layered quick fudge the colors of candy corn, not candy corn flavored), but there was no way I'd be able to eat it all myself and I had no occasion to bring it anywhere this year.

HHday 86: Halloween Baking

[spiralicious]

I did not do any Halloween baking this year, though I did watch a lot of Halloween Baking Championship, where I got the sushi brain recipe.

I totally made the sushi brain. They were trying to serve it as a dip, personally, it worked better as a slice and serve appetizer. The recipe is from back in 2014 and only seems to exist as a video on Food Network's YouTube channel, but it is essentially this:

-cream cheese
-avocado
-prepared sushi rice
-smoked salmon (think thinly sliced east coast/nova, not Pacific Northwest style)
-roe

1. Halve and peel your avocado and remove the pit. You want your avocado to still be avocado shaped when you put the two halves together.

2. Fill the hole where the pit was with cream cheese

3. Put the avocado halves together and place on plate

4. Use sushi rice to build brain shape around avocado

5. Cover your brain shaped ball of rice with slices of smoked salmon. Try to make it wrinkly.

6. Create an indent, think the space between the two hemispheres of the brain, and place roe in the indent to make it look a bit bloody (I did not do this step)

7. Tightly wrap in plastic wrap and carefully press to help shape your brain (this really does help presentation wise)

8. Serve

HHday 87: pumpkin patch

[spiralicious]

We don't have a local pumpkin patch as far as I know. At least we didn't when I was a kid and as far as I know we still don't, so I buy my pumpkins from the grocery store. My goal is to one day just have the porch covered in pumpkins one year (they don't have to all be real), but we are not there yet. This year, I got a regular orange carving pumpkin and what was labeled a blue doll pumpkin. I have a thing for blue pumpkins. I did carve the orange pumpkin, as I didn't have time to come up with a painting scheme. The blue doll was way to thick to carve though, which I knew, yet I tried anyway. I blame being tired.

I did see a sign for "Asian Heirloom Pumpkins," but didn't get to investigate further.

Last year, I didn't carve two of the pumpkins I got (a small knucklehead & a mini white) and kept them in the house, planning on putting them out when they started to go off. Except they never did. Come Halloween this year, they were both perfectly fine. I was in awe and slightly afraid of them. I know pumpkins last a long time uncarved, but this was a first. After a week outside though this year, they finally went. They shall be remembered.

HHday 88: cemetery

[spiralicious]

Surprisingly, I did go to the cemetery this year. It's not surprising I went. I used to go regularly. When I went is the surprising part. My friend M came in September and visited me for the first time in 6 years and my mother was giving her a driving tour of town and for reasons I do not know, we stopped at one of the cemeteries. I was surprised and M was not impressed, but we did go.

HHday 89: out of this world

[spiralicious]

I debated what to talk about for this one, but then I realized a staple of my Halloween season is my alien head. I used to use it as dish for giving out candy, but it's a bad shape for it, but I do try to incorporate it somehow every year. It's a classic, green alien head that is slightly larger than an adult human head. It's hollow because it was originally a store display for Alien Pops. It also has the top of it's head as a lid and removable Alien Pops sign.

I have no idea if alien pops still exist. They were a candy in the 90s and you see alien head displays on ebay and similar places sometimes, but I got mine as a child/preteen. I cannot remember what store I was in with my mother, it was some place we almost never went, and at the register was the alien head display with candy in it and a sign for a raffle. They were raffling off the alien head when the candy ran out. I thought it was cool, but wasn't going to enter because I had convinced myself that I wouldn't win, and if I did win, my mother wouldn't let me have it, but shockingly, she talked me into entering. Weeks later, we got the phone call that I had in fact won and its been one of my prize possessions since, though I have no space to display it most of the year.

HHday 91: Halloween Party

[spiralicious]

I went to no Halloween parties this year, but I do think it's funny that this prompt landed on the same day as the Library's 30th anniversary party, which I did go to. I had work the same day, so I had to go early. I'd like to think it livened up a bit later, but it was pretty dead when I went. To be fair, the 20th and 25th anniversaries were bigger events, but this year, they had a lot of photos and history stuff on display that I hadn't seen before which was pretty cool. They also gave out free ice cream. Later there was live music, but that was while I was at work.

HHday 92: Carved Pumpkins

[spiralicious]

My Favorite Pumpkin Carving Tips:

Cut the pumpkin open from the bottom instead of the top - This was a game changer for me. As long as the cut is even enough across for the pumpkin to sit flat, you can make the whole huge, making it easier to clean out. No losing the top if you miss cut the hole. And the best part, you can just set the pumpkin over your light source.

Using a hand mixer to loosen up the insides before you scrape it out - This depends on your mixer, the length of your beaters, and the size of your pumpkin, but knocking everything loose with the hand mixer first, before scraping out the guts, had made the process of cleaning out my pumpkin take about a fourth of the time it used to and its slightly cleaner.

Drawing the face on with a red dry erase pen or red sharpie before you carve - This only works if you are carving an orange pumpkin, but basically, using a dry erase marker means you can usually erase your lines and using red ink means that lines you couldn't erase don't generally aren't visible once the pumpkin is lit up.

This one is an honorable mentions: coating the cut parts of your pumpkin with vaseline to help it last longer to keep it from drying out. This has never worked for me, but I know people it has worked for. I would be very careful if you try this and you plan on using a real candle to light your pumpkin.

HHday 93: Sweatshirt

[spiralicious]

It always surprises me that people do not know this, but sweatshirts make the best costume base staple. The best examples of this is to look at homemaker magazines and look at their easy toddler and preschool costumes. Almost all of them are sweatshirt based and can translate into an adult sized costume.

Examples:
One year, my eldest nephew and I went as teenage mutant ninja turtles. Our costumes were green sweatpants, green sweatshirts, backpacks for shells (also serving as candy bags), appropriate colored scarves at wrists, elbows, and knees, and somehow we had gotten official masks. It was the 90s, so they were cheap flat plastic with a little elastic string to hold it on, but still

Bat: black, brown, or purple hooded sweatshirt. Add ears to the hood and fabric from the inside the arms to the sides to create wings. Wear matching tights or pants. Add details as wanted.

Goldfish: The toddler version of this costume is to get an adult sized orange hooded sweatshirt that goes to the kid's ankles. You put fish eyes on the hood and add rows of large fabric scales to the front of the sweatshirt. And put the kid in coordinating tights. When I did it as an adult, I just made a very simple skirt that looked like a tail out of the same fabric I used for the scales on the sweatshirt. Add details as wanted.

Crow: Black hooded sweatshirt with a beak and eyes on the hood and a black feather boa attached across the sleeves. Wear with black pants. Add details as needed.

bears, care bears, and a variety of other animals: hooded sweatshirt of desired color, add ears to hood. Wear matching sweat pants. Add details as needed.

Those are just ones I've done. With a quick google search, I found: unicorns, spiders, dinosaurs, skeletons, Minions, Mike Wazowski, ghost, Marshmellow, fire, knight, lobster, kid from ET, shark, Olaf from Frozen, octopus, The Lorax, Link, flower, gingerbread man, ice cream sundae, soap, mummy, my little pony, snail, & Aragorn.

Let your imaginations run wild.

[apachefirecat]

I feel you on so many prompts getting to be too much... Looking forward to seeing more posts from you, and, girl, you may well have just given me an idea for something I've been toying with for a couple of months now! Although rather or not I actually STOP toying with it, we shall see...

Much love to you, my dear friend, this season and always!!!!!