Day One

Hey folks (both of you that stumbled upon this and haven’t hit the back button yet) October’s here, and that means Halloween’s coming up on us soon. Of course, the stores have been goading us since August like the eager whores they are by putting out the bags of fun-size candies. Hey there, sailor. See anything you like? Don’t give me that ‘I’m only here for butter and Mango Cosmopolitan mix’ line, I can see in your eyes what you really want. Fun-size Skittles, three dolla. C’mon, just a little taste won’t hurt you. Sure, it’s a good time then, but can you really bear the shame the next morning, when you come to, groggy, missing your wallet and a kidney, with the bed and surrounding floor littered with tiny, pumpkin-laden Skittles bags?

…Yeah, I know I promised I wouldn’t bring that up anymore. But Jesus man, the whole bag? What were you thinking?

Since it’s only October first, I feel it’s not time to bust out the big guns yet. So in the spirit of starting small, we’re starting cheap. With that in mind, let’s talk dollar-bin Halloween decorations. If you’re into Halloween (like me) and a moderately dirt poor, post-college twenty-something(like me) you can appreciate the desire to decorate on the cheap without the hassle of planning ahead and hitting the post-Halloween close-outs the year before.




These, as you can guess, are what you can scrounge for a dollar (or less) from assorted $1 stores, or the ‘value’ section of most chain super-stores, like Target or Wal-Mart. Take this stylish Ghost Bucket for example:




I’ll be honest with you, he actually cost me in the ballpark of forty cents last year, but we’ll let that slide. He was cheap as Hell, so that’s what counts. But don’t be fooled! Despite his opaque, greenish hue, he does not glow in the dark. That expression on his face? Shame. Total and utter shame. Or wistful longing for the ability to glow in the dark. Perhaps mocking derision at my amateurish picture-taking. Who can tell?

Now, you may be saying, ‘Lady, what’s so great about a ghost bucket?’. Slow down, Hoss! First off, it’s Ghost Bucket. And really, what can’t you do with a Ghost Bucket? Keep your candy in it. Let that kid who keeps calling you ‘Daddy’ for some odd reason use it as a candy pail (but only if you’re unaware of the superiority of pillowcases, or really hate that kid). This little champ held our stash of Candy Corn. Then after Halloween, his noble deed done, my roommates and I would throw our bottle caps in him. These days, he’s retired to a simple life of holding all the post-its and mechanical pencils Mom would send me in care packs.

This budget Halloween decoration? He delivered.

So with three dollars worth of spare change and a clear mission in mind, I went to Target. And what did I return with?

Two packages of gel window clings and 60” of tinsel garland.




Our first pack of gel clings has your standard spooky cat, bats, spiders, and a few little sigil doo-dads. Although they probably look all black to you, looking really closely and holding them up to the light just so revealed one bat and the diamonds were purple, while the spiders are brown. Swanky, eh?




The second pack of gel clings has the more cartoony cats, a ‘SPOOKY’ label, and that… cave drawing of Simba from the Lion King. Also, the ‘s’ from SPOOKY is clearly the number two. So, what can this mean? Simple cost-cutting? No! I prefer to think the spirits of Halloween bargains are trying to tell us something, like a poor man’s Ouija Board. 2 POOKY? Who is Pooky, and what do I have to give to him? My soul? A message from the other side? A name-drop in this article? Tell me, spirits!

Or maybe… maybe the o’s are really zeroes? 2-0-0… 200!

We have 200, but 200 what, exactly? Rearranging the letters, we get KPY. 200 KPY? Kids per year? Oh, Hell no. Don’t tell me I’m going to have 200 kids showing up at my door every Halloween for the rest of my life demanding candy. If that happens, I’m switching to handing out non-name-brand caramels and Mary Janes.

Sorry about the crappy candy, kids of future Halloweens. The spirits warned me there’d be unending waves of you for decades to come, so I’m buying cheap and I’m buying bulk. On the other hand, this could simply be a retardedly obtuse puzzle, like something out of Metal Gear Solid. I don’t have time to continually re-arrange this gibberish to find out Campbell’s new Codec frequency, Spirits! This is Halloween! We’ll just have to pass this along to Pooky and let him try and makes heads or tails of it.




On to the garland! It’s purple, shiny, has cool little confetti bats on it. And it’s not very long. Five feet of garland for a buck isn’t bad, but at the same time, you’d better have a small living space, or hope people coming over don’t ask about the one strand of garland that doesn’t even make it across one wall. Sure, you could buy several strings of garland, but then the cost starts adding up and we’re crossing the line from ‘budget’ to ‘regularly priced’. Not to mention the feral, unpredictable nature of the bargain bin. Sure, the ‘Iridescent with pumpkins’ may be just what you’re looking for, but what happens when there’s only one of those, but fifty ‘orange with spiders’ garland? Are you really willing to ruin the entire motif of your Halloween shindig just because it’s ‘what they had’? It’s a gamble. A dangerous, often deadly gamble.

But enough about that. What can I possibly decorate with my meager pickings? Oh ho, just you wait, my friends. It may shock you.




Or not. Here’s the first thing I managed to spruce up for the season. My computer monitor! Gotta get in the mood, kiddos. No sense driving a hearse if you’re not an undertaker or Ghostbuster, and no sense writing about Halloween stuff if your computer isn’t sporting the appropriate accoutrements. Besides, it’s not like I could do much else with the garland. And the clings on the computer monitor is actually way more distracting than you’d think. Can I see the time? No. But damn if it doesn’t match perfectly with the garland. Computer of The Damned here, ladies and gents.

And as for the remaining gel clings, they went over here, onto the only moderately sized glass surface I have where everything wouldn’t look too spaced out.




This is Dapper Dan, with his cage being transformed from a humdrum run of the mill hovel, into a Spook-tacular House of Horrors! By the by, I like typing ‘house of horrors’ far more than saying it. I can’t be the only one that thinks it comes out sounding too much like ‘house of whores’, no matter how hard you try to enunciate it.

So, Dan, does this have you raring to go for Halloween?




…I see.

Come back tomorrow, it’ll probably be about candy! And stay tuned for more Halloween crap in the days to come, including terrible dollar horror movies, terrible full priced horror movies, mood music, things I’ve found in the attic, Silent Hill, and more!