Halloween Displays, Part III

Yeah, that isn't a good start....

I told you that we had a lot of material, and here comes a pile of it.

We surveyed Facebook, got some leads, followed up on them, and here's what we came up with. We'll have a few more issues before Halloween plays itself out this Saturday night.

Be sure to check out Part One and Part Two, if you wish.

We ran from Rochester to Whitman and then back South through Hanson, Halifax, Plympton, Carver and Plymouth.

We still have Duxbury and Cape Cod to go through. The weather cost us today and maybe tomorrow, and we may do Duxbury while we're trick-or-treating there.

Duxbury gets their own day, because we know a guy there who might be spending $5K on decorations, and we get full-size Snickers and so forth all up and down Washington Street.

The winds of today's storm may cost us our foliage hunting, which we will take up in earnest on November 1st. The South Coast and Cape Cod turn around then, anyhow.

Halloween is a pagan ritual, adopted by the Romans, modified to fit Christianity, imported from Europe and perfected by America.

Halloween celebrations were banned in colonial New England, as the Puritan forefathers weren't fans of pagan, superstitious celebrations. Halloween was the night before a solemn Holy day. Remember, these were people who frowned on Christmas, because it was too Church-like.

An influx of Irish immigrants helped popularize the Halloween traditions in America, and the traditions have held on to our present day.

It soon became primarily a children's holiday, although it is more of a children-of-all-ages thing.

No irony intended, I just had to shoot over a car.

America spent 6 billion dollars celebrating Halloween in 2010, and that was at the height of the Great Recession.  That ranks it 7th among money spent on American holidays, just behind Father's Day at #6 and way behind #1 Christmas at $130 billion.

There are more kids than fathers in America, but you can't handle Dad with two mini Kit Kat bars. You have to at least buy him a tie or something. That adds up.

Kids make it up at Christmas. It's a kid's world, we're just running it for them.

Most Popular Halloween Costumes, according to Google Trends and CNN:

#1, Harley Quinn

#2 Star Wars

#3 Superhero (Non Superman, Non Avenger...generic, Villain or Other, see #5,9,10)

#4 Pirate

#5 Batman

#6 Minnie Mouse

#7 Witch

#8 Minion

#9 Joker

#10 Wonder Woman

My Own Top 5 Halloween Shows/Movies/Stories

- It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

My personal favorite, also the source of the worst overdub video of all time.

- Halloween

I prefer the Carpenter one to the White Zombie one, but I am just one lonesome columnist.

- The Nightmare Before Christmas

I've never seen it, and I'm not sure this is even a  Halloween movie, but it seems to be everywhere, so we'll throw it up in the mix.

- The Fat Albert Halloween Special

The Cosby mansion is now the Worst Place To Trick Or Treat in Hollywood.

- The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

You can't deny the Headless Horseman his spot, he's sort of like Halloween's Santa Claus.

Films That Involve Halloween But Aren't Halloween Films

- To Kill A Mockingbird climaxes on Halloween, which is a sinister sentence to say about pre-teen Scout Finch.

- Arsenic And Old Lace has a Halloween wedding

- Regina steals Cady's BF at a Halloween party in Mean Girls

- The Exorcist, while not a Halloween film, was set in Halloween season.

- You know that Ernest Scared Stupid isn't set on Arbor Day, payer.

Worst Halloween Specials

- The Lou Grant Halloween Episode

- The Paul Lynde Halloween Special

- The Fall Guy "October The 32d" episode

- The Dukes Of Hazzard, "The Hazzardville Horror" episode

- The Smurfs, "The Legend Of Smurfy Hollow"

- Fraggle Rock, "The Terrible Tunnel."

We'll get a few more articles in before Halloween, thanks for checking us out!

Halloween Displays, Part II

Ain't no stoppin' us now! Cranberry County Magazine is driving through your town, photographing your yard... all in search of cool Halloween Displays! We don't ask, we take!

We posted Part One yesterday, and we'll be laying down the law all week, probably on the daily.

We questioned Facebook, and let the people dictate our travels. We covered a lot of ground, and here's some of what we found.

We caught this family in the act! Busted!

This family, in Plymouth, is unique in that we spoke to them before shooting. I generally avoid doing so. I'm a very large man, and I dress shabbily enough that generous people tell me that I look like a basketball coach... while others say that I look homeless. I'm not the guy you want to see walking into your yard, and I'd fully understand if someone shot me.

"That's the life, that I lead..."

Cranberry County Magazine will always be up in your spot. Jessica's very first article with me ended up with us being spoken to by a Detective, although that was pretty much 105% my fault. Hey, I thought Edaville Railroad was abandoned, like Rocky Point or Pripyat.... honest mistake, the detective understood fully.

I should never get out of the car, but sometimes I do.

No, we don't decorate our own yard. We have a pumpkin, and we may even carve it, but that's about it.

I have a pretty isolated house, not many people see it. No one in my neighborhood has had a trick-or-treater in the ten years I've lived here. I enjoy Halloween vicariously through creative people, just like you are doing right now.

I don't even take my own kid around the neighborhood, nor do any of the parents I see at the bus stop. I take my kid to a high-end neighborhood in Duxbury, where we aim for full-size candy bars. It works better than you'd think it would.

They may be on to me on Washington Street, however. We might have to try Shore Road in Chatham or Jerusalem Road in Cohasset this year.

Jessica, who is considerably smaller than I am, has already refused in advance and (forgive my Latin legalese) ad infinitum to wear a kid's costume and a mask to disguise her adult appearance and double our candy haul. I was kind of hoping for Sexy Nurse.

Also, if I am trick-or-treating with two kids, people will give me beer. Most suburban homeowners keep beer handy, and drop one on an adult herding around a sizable group of kids. A parent needs fortification on cold autumn nights.

Again, this strategy works better than you'd think it would.

Maybe things are different than when I was a kid. Maybe I got too big, and the decorations that scared me as a child now are like the 30" faux Stonehenge from Spinal Tap. Maybe I should blame shoddy Asian manufacturing.

It seemed like every house in Quincy in the 1970s was done up for Halloween. My 1980s hood in Duxbury was a bit less decorated, but that was also a highly isolated village that had maybe 20 people living in it after Labor Day.

It's the hyper-suburban forest/tree question... if you put a pumpkin or your steps and no one sees it, did you really decorate?

That's not a problem the people in the pictures you see today have, because Cranberry County Magazine cares enough to go out and document the fun.

Other things that I never encountered in the 1970s includes our aborted mission to the Pine Hills of Plymouth.

The Pine Hills looked tremendous on paper. Nice houses, rich people, and the sheer size of the place means that there must be a ton of kids. Of course it was going to be decorated.

We paused outside the entrance. We only had a little sunlight left to work with. The question that was stopping us... would a place like that have restrictions on decorations?

Time is money, daylight was wastin', and we didn't have any leads in that neighborhood. We headed inland, to the house with the spooky statues in the yard.

We weren't at Versailles, either.

Don't get me wrong, it was a sweet house, just maybe not statue-sweet. I'm pretty sure that this was Middleboro.

Middle Bro has some cool 1800s houses, and is spooky in her own right, but this yard was trippin' balls. I'd hate to go there at night, and would probably refuse to enter the yard unless they were handing out Kit-Kats or something yummy.

I'm lucky that I don't take LSD anymore, because this house would have broken me if I had been Walking With The King.

This is the most ostentatious flowerpot that I have ever seen. I think that may be Atlas.

The ladder implies that this house isn't finished yet, always a plus mark in the Hardcore category.

We sort of ran three trips so far. We did a Weymouth-Hingham-Norwell-Hanover run that started too late and was interrupted by a nice dinner at Wahlburgers.

The next day, we worked Plymouth, Kingston, Plympton and Halifax.

Yesterday, we finished Halifax after going through Rochester, Carver, Bridgewater and both parts of Whitman/Hanson.

Our two big remaining trips- and this is both weather and auto permitting- are Duxbury and Cape Cod. I may run a Bourne-Wareham trip today if I can sneak away from the Ol' Ball & Chain.

Stay Spooky!

Halloween Displays Around SE Massachusetts: Part One

We had a fairly good series of thoughts the other day.

- We should do a Halloween Display article.
- Very few singular people can give a list of 250 or so houses with cool displays (I am now one of these people).
- Why not use Facebook (I spam our articles over every You Know You're From ____ When... page in the region, and have access to scores of such groups) to get a good list going?
- Gather up the suggestions (we had a few hundred) and start mapping routes for several road trips.
- Spill our results out over a series of pre-Halloween articles.

We rarely start off with that much of a game plan, so this will probably end up working out OK.

We got a bevy of suggestions for where to look. We ranged from Plymouth (the Slenderman-looking Tim Burton guy at the top of the article) to the skeletal Wizard of Oz scene we saw in Weymouth, to wherever else our travels took us.

Facebook was very handy. We got a pile of street names. Some got repeated, always a good sign. I'm still getting suggestions as I write this, but fear not- we have enough pictures for several days of articles on this subject.

We got a few bum steers (we had several in a row on our first run), but we also stumbled onto some cool stuff, so it sort of balanced out. I'm not into Wicca, but I think they're big on Mother Earth and all, and nature loves a balance. My own logic is witchy enough that we went home happy most of the time.

Rich people plaza.... nice setup, though. It needs a Zombie, right in that empty spot near the hay bales.

We drove down a lot of Massachusetts streets doing this series of articles. Some towns stood out more than others, but not by a wide margin (editor's note: we haven't done Deluxebury yet) Most people don't decorate at all. Among those that do, most are subtle. A pumpkin, a scarecrow, a few cornstalks... you know, the regular.

We set out to find people who went in a little deeper. I'm talkin' ten-foot-spider-swallowing-a-human-in-front-of-a-two-hundred-sixty-one-year-old-historical-register-property deep.

Apparently, things get a little more ultraviolent on Bartlett's Green than I was previously led to believe.

The spider also looks like hes doing the Baby Bird with some poor intern, but that was most likely not the intent of the sculptor.

That spider, a Kingston resident, doesn't dare try that act in Duxbury. If he did, he'd get tuned up by Duxbury's legendary Green Dragon. The GD holds it down off Route 3A in Duxbury. There are those who say that he stares into your soul as you drive by him.

The Green Dragon does year-round duty, but he gets extra powers on Halloween. If you ever look up at the nearby Myles Standish monument and wonder where his sword went.... well, it got busted off quick-fast when Myles tried that St. George stuff with the Route 3A Dragon. You know... back in the day.

Kids dress in all sorts of costumes. They sometimes favor horror (my kid had to be carefully edged away from Creepypasta-themed costumes), but they sometimes go out as a Princess or a Cowboy or an Astronaut. Its not always horror, although it was for most of the history of the activity.

However, people who decorate their lawns almost always go for Horror. I checked out almost every town, including yours. I saw a lot of chainsaw massacres and MacBeth-ian witch gatherings, but I rarely saw innocent Haloween decorations. I can think of one, a Peanuts-themed setup in Halifax that I'll get to in another article.

We'll throw in the obligatory warning that I am a much worse photographer than Jessica is. As you see below, we also have some trouble shooting at night.

I may take another crack at this shot above, It's off Herring Pond Road in Plymouth, and I pass it all the time. Even a hack photographer will get lucky if Stephen he shoots enough.

Our principal value to you is our legs. We covered a lot of ground doing this article, and we aren't done yet.

We'll try to drop an article a day up until Halloween hits. If your town got jobbed this time, fear not. We'll probably get to it in a few days.

Stay Spooky!

South Shore Foliage, 10/21/15

We rolled out with monster truck force all over the South Shore's interior as we tracked down the places that have already turned over. This is East Monponsett Lake, in Halifax.

This part of Massachusetts (Plympton, Route 106) gets some cool foliage. It just tends to be worked into the proverbial Sea Of Green. No, I have no idea why one tree is orange and every other one is green, that's between you and Mother Nature. I just click the camera and write the captions, friend.

You don't get those Vermont calendar pictures in Duxbury. I have no mountains to look down from, and too many pine trees. At times, I'm reduced to shooting at branches on a single tree.

We were gonna shoot video, but..well, trees don't really do that much. We were ready to turn the video on if a Sasquatch walked out of a South Halifax forest.

Kingston got some licks in, especially in the Jones River Reservoir area off Route 80. We started in Duxbury, then went into Kingston. We essentially flipped a coin as to left or right onto Rout 80, we went right and found this about 100 yards later.

If you take your glasses off, it looks like a tree fire. I should have rolled a smoke bomb under that, or maybe even exhaled a fat hit into the picture just before I clicked.

We got a cloudy day for Rural Exploration, but there was no wind, so we got some sweet lake-reflection shots.

We have mobile photography capabilities, they even come out sometimes.

With Monponsett Lake(s), we're in there like swimwear.

We're just warming up, so we have plenty of more work to do. We may still expand our reach up into the Athol/Ashburnham corridor, they're peaking right now.

We will also be all over the South Coast, South Shore, and Cape Cod. You know were good like that.

Rural Exploration, And Our Fall Preview

Middleboro, MA

Autumn is here, and we're shifting gears into Fall Stuff.

When I was teaching at a Charlestown charter school, we had a class called Urban Exploration. "Urb X" was a code word we'd use for "our lesson plan got fouled up for some reason, so we're going to take the bus around Boston and show the sights to the kids. Give me lunch money for 8 kids and 2 staff."

To be fair... although I was most likely the one who had the fouled-up lesson plan, credit for the terms "Urban Exploration" and "Urb X" goes to a football coach named Mr. Cawthorne or something close to that. Left to me, the title would have been the less-smooth-sounding "We're gonna take the bus and drive around town for 3 hours," which program directors of charter schools probably wouldn't sign off on.

Some of my better classes were from Urb X, and I tried to incorporate the same spirit into my career as a shabby-website content generator. We did a bit of Urb X yesterday... although, since we went up Route 105 and down Route 106, it was technically Rural X.

As we said, Autumn is here, so we thought we'd trot out a fisherman's platter of what we'll be up to over the next few months.

I'm thinking maybe Lakeville, MA, Fall 2014

We have several trips planned to cover Fall Foliage. Ideally, we plan to catch some late September foliage in Maine, and then move down the coast with it until we are polishing up with Cape Cod after Halloween.

Marlboros costing $4.95 a pack in small-town New Hampshire has nothing to do with the frequency of these trips. Everybody buys 180 packs at once, Officer.

We also have a bee in our bonnet about stealing acorns from New Hampshire, planting them along the Cape Cod Canal, and turning the Canal into the Fall Foliage destination of 2075 AD or so, whenever the trees grow enough to turn Yellow regularly. We'll be pumping that article out after I interview a few experts.

Cranberry County Magazine has road offices in Freeport, Maine, Bow, New Hampshire, and Jeremiah's Lot, Vermont. We're analyzing more spots than Matlock, and we've got this Leaf Game on padlock.

In theory, we'll have a 4-5 fall foliage article run that starts in Maine in late September and ends up on Cape Cod after Halloween. Droughts, wind storms, low motivation and lack of money/free time may screw up this schedule, but we're looking good as of 9/22.

We did go to Maine last week, but saw nothing foliage-ish of note. The locals told me two more weeks or so.

Plympton MA

Massachusetts, especially the part of Massachusetts we work, isn't as known for her foliage/greenery as other parts of New England are. However, you can find some good 1700s stuff if you snoop around a bit and drive down the side streets.

Between flowers and foliage and even us stumbling through some dude's farm, we'll try to go out among the reapers now and then.

The harvest, formerly the occupation of just about everyone, is barely important now to anyone but farmers, craft fair hosts and the media. However, there is still a primordial recognition in most humans for the harvest season. At worst, it is perhaps the most powerful omen for the change of seasons that we have.

I feel it, and I can't even grow old properly, let alone grow cranberries. We're looking at late October for the hard color pics.

Speaking of which...

Buzzards Bay, MA

Another thing that we intend to pound into the mat is the local Cranberry haul.

The mighty cranberry is in the title of this website, so you know that we're going to represent hard at the harvest.

The compound in Buzzards Bay is just across the street from a cranberry bog, so we should be able to get this one done just by walking the Shorty out to the bus stop.

The possibility of us going inland and upstate to pursue non-coastal cranberry harvests is there, although I shouldn't need to drive any further than Carver or Hanson.

I'm a hack photographer at best, but even I can get some Ansel Adams work in if I snap enough shots at a cranberry bog with the sun shining overhead.

There is also talk of scooping a few buckets of cranberries out of Mann Farm's vast pile, dumping a few bags of sugar into a big pot, cooking/chilling, and then seeing how much cranberry sauce I can eat in one sitting. The goal would be to turn my skin burgundy.

Billingsgate Farm, Plympton MA

You know we'll be talking about pumpkins, player!

Pumpkins figure heavily in our harvest season, even more than the more ubiquitous cranberry. They are the premier decorative item for both the harvest season and Halloween, to the point where a great majority of the people who buy pumpkins have no intention of eating them.

We'll use pumpkins for photos, articles about visiting pumpkin patches, articles about decoration, Thanksgiving pie recipes, Halloween vandalism talk, and even excuses for doing vintage D'Arcy Wretzky image searches.

One thing we're kicking around is the idea of gathering (via a lot of Rural X, or from Facebook friends) a collection of pictures featuring the better Halloween displays. We'll do the same for whoever we see over-lighting their house at Christmas.

Halloween is important to us, and we also plan to run our Expand The Bridgewater Triangle article during this season, and perhaps explore a few haunted locations in our coverage area.

We also want to blow up a pumpkin with whatever fireworks we can gather up on our Foliage trips. This, and my idea to do a Diet Coke/Mentos experiment that involves tossing the bottle off of the Bourne Bridge onto the bike path below, is pretty much as deep into Science as we get here. I also have a great desire to film a pumpkin being shot by a high caliber weapon.

We actually are in preliminary discussions with a gun-range owner in Texas about re-creating the JFK assassination with pumpkins.

Me: I'm thinking that you get a pumpkin, fill it with Zar-Ex, put it in a suit, drive it around in a convertible and shoot it from 6 stories up out of a moving limo.

Them: Huh?

Me: Don't worry, I'll pay for the ammo, the pumpkins, the Zar-Ex and lunch for the shootist.

Them: How do you plan to do this?

Me: Don't worry about it. I can also provide the Kennedy accent for the doomed pumpkin. My girlfriend can do the Jackie O screaming. She's French, it'll be seamless.

Them (from TX): What's Zar-Ex?

Duxbury Beach, MA

We also will have the photographers embedded for any nor'easters that may come up once October comes around.

September and October have hosted some of our worst storms, including the Halloween Gale.

If we get our ship tightened up some, we'll try to get into some other towns for our nor'easter photography. I've always wanted to do a storm in Scituate, the Outer Cape, and on the Grey Lady.

I do have a press pass that, if I presented it to the cops and they called it to verify my vocation, would ring up my own phone. That should get me on the block.

It goes without saying that, should we get the opportunity to shoot a nor'easter, it will most likely be caused by weather conditions that will effectively cancel the rest of our foliage articles.

That should carry us through Thanksgiving...