Bhooooooooooooooooooooth :-O

I'm not reviewing a horror film. Nor did I have any paranormal experiences to share in my blog. I just made the title a bit dramatic for the celebration of Halloween here in US. No no no, we don't celebrate it. But its kind of like any festival in India, what with stuff being advertized all over TV, stuff seen in all corridors of supermarts and the decorations in front of homes (thats the best part) :).

Halloween, Wikipedia tells me, is a tradition celebrated on the night of October 31 (looks like I am 1 day early :-D), most notably by children dressing in costumes and going door-to-door collecting sweets. It was originally known as "All Saints' day". Many European cultural traditions hold that Halloween is one of the liminal times of the year when the spiritual world can make contact with the physical world and when magic is most potent.

For halloween, people decorate their front porches with jack-o-lanterns, scarecrows, witches, ghosts etc. Usually kids dress up in costumes (everything ranging from Superman to Dracula :-D) and go door-to-door in their neighborhood, ringing each doorbell and yelling "trick or treat!". And they get some treats :). Nobody has come to my door till now. I hope nobody came on saturday and sunday as we had been out to Smoky mountains for our yearly autumn colours quota (thats the post coming up next :-D). But if some kids do come today/tomorrow, I have the chocolates ready :)).

Meanwhile, I saw many interesting decorations in my neighbourhood and was so impressed with the time and effort gone into some of those. The post is a result of that awe :).




Most of the house front porches are decorated with various things like artificial skulls, bones, pumpkins and scarecrows ofcourse :).




Even the trees are not spared (:-D):




The decorations are not really scary, but might be for little children ;-). The scarecrows and pumpkins are all smiling, but well maybe they are all smiling wickedly :-O.




But you can make out that some decorations have really taken some thought and lots of effort, like this one and this is my favourite of them all:




The cotton made to look like webs does look creepy ;-) :-D. Some porches had these paper ghosts that glow in the dark on the trees, big air balloons shaped like pumpkins (the balloons had all lost air, so couldn't get any pics of those :-p) and also various other creepy statues.




There was one house which had a Egypitian-mummy like corpse statue and a well. And this below one has a skeleton sitting in a chair :-D.




Its fun for everyone, for the people who put up the decorations and for the on-lookers as well. But there are some people who protest against halloween saying its a occult evil holiday and not a Christian religion celebration. It seems Halloween was not celebrated at all in the 1980's. In one apartment that we previously lived in last year, one of our neighbours had distributed these pamplets saying how Halloween is about cults who serve satan. We told them that we are not Christians and hence will not be celebrating Halloween anyways :-D. But most other people seem to think that Halloween is just a harmless holiday for the kids to dress up and enjoy candies :).

Anyways the celebration as such makes no difference to me, except for the fact that I enjoy the creativity of the decorations :). And taking photos :). And putting them up in my blog :-D.