Haven’t carved your jack o’ lantern yet? Now I prefer free-handing it myself, but if you want to get fancy or have had jack o’ disasters before, here’s a selection of places to find FREE stencils and patterns. If you want to do a Cthulhu o’ lantern like the one pictured, find the pattern here.

History.com
Readers Digest
DLTK
Better Homes and Gardens
Stoneykins

When looking for idea for this…probably ridiculous-to-start-with “31 Days of Halloween” idea…a son reminded me of how he used to love reading joke books and how Halloween had especially funny jokes…if you are seven or eight. Still, Halloween is for all ages, so we (not so proudly) present some seasonal laughs, snickers, giggles, and titters:

Q: How do monsters tell their future?
A: They read their horrorscope.

Q: Why do vampires need mouthwash?
A: They have bat breath.

Q: Where do vampires keep their money?
A: The blood bank

Q: What is a witch’s favorite subject in school?
A: Spelling

Q: How do you know a zombie is tired?
A: He’s dead on his feet.

Q: What instrument does a skeleton play?
A: Trombone.

Q; What do you get when you cross a vampire and a snowman?
A: Frostbite.

Q: What happens when a ghost gets lost in the fog?
A: He is mist.

Q: Why do demons and ghouls hang out together?
A: Because demons are a ghoul’s best friend.

Ba-dump-dump!

Okay, ask me my favorite books to read for the Halloween season and you’ll get a limited answer—I have so many I’m afraid I’ll forget to list some.

But it’s fairly easy for me to recommend five films for Halloween. I’m not a big horror movie buff. Shock and gore isn’t scary and for suspenseful “surprise” endings — I tend to guess endings in the first ten minutes. So, to be a favorite, a movie has to be memorable, one that I’m willing to watch more than once and still enjoy. In fact, some of my picks are more macabre—or even darkly humorous—than scary. And, yes, I cheat (there are really six films). I could cheat more and mention Sleepy Hollow, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Corpse Bride, and Sweeney Todd—but then we’d be having a Tim Burton-a-thon. You have to admit, though, the man is Halloween.

1. The Crow (1994)
Flawed, yet perfect. Set on Devil’s Night/Halloween and a love story to boot: “If the people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn. People die. But real love is forever.”

2. The Haunting (1963)
The only black-and-white movie that ever held my kids spellbound (and also scared ’em). Sounds and shadows and suspense are scarier than blood and guts any day.

3. The Witches (1990)
A sinister black comedy, Roald Dahl’s novel is a super read and the movie is almost as good. Anjelica Huston is a wonderfully terrible Eva Ernst

4. (Tie) The Others (2001) and The Sixth Sense (1999)
Okay, I did figure both of these out before the endings, but it took more than ten minutes and M. Night Shymalan deserves major credit for making two incredibly suspenseful films. The Sixth Dense owes a great deal to the script as well as the performances. In the Others, Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of an overprotective with kids allergic to light, pulls you right in. Both are visually superb.

5. Dark City (1998)
Like The Crow, directed by Alexa Proyas. Very noirish exploration of concepts of reality, identity, and more. The obvious rip-off of Clive Barker’s cenobites is sort of a bummer, though.

Blood

“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.” — Clive Barker

Vampires drink it. A werewolf’s bite poisons your blood and you become a beast yourself. Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed supposedly bathed in the blood of slaughtered virgins to retain her youth. Human monsters spill rivers of blood…

Blood both attracts and repels. Needed for life, directly connected to death, the sight — even the thought — of blood elicits an immediate and deep-seated emotional response.

Blood literally holds the power of life and death; humans have always assigned it magical capabilities, sacred meaning, and ritual significance. Blood can be taboo; blood can sanctify. Ancient Egyptians thought blood carried the essence of life. Roman gladiators drank the blood of defeated foes to gain their strength. The Bible mentions blood over 400 times. “For the life of the flesh is in the blood,” says Leviticus, then prohibits the children of Israel from consuming blood or allowing strangers who do so to live with them.

Red wine was associated with the blood of the Greek god Dionysus, and his followers symbolically drank it as the god’s blood. The blood of Christ is signified by the wine of the Eucharist. Conversely, religious sacrifice marked by the spilling of the victim’s blood, “fed” and nourished ancient deities.

From the Greeks through the middle ages, “scientific” theory held that the body was a microcosm of nature. Since natural phenomena was thought to be produced by combinations of the four elements — air, fire, water, and earth — it was assumed there were four analogous elements, or “humors,” governing the body. The four humors were phlegm, choler, bile, and blood. Blood was the Paramount Humor. It supposedly carried the vital life-spirit throughout the body, sloshing about through “pores” in the heart, ebbing and flowing back and forth through the veins and arteries. To maintain good health, one “balanced” these humors. Bleeding — intentional bloodletting — a person help achieve this. Phlebotomy — the “medical” practice of bloodletting — originated in ancient times and was practiced through the second Industrial Revolution. Indian and Arabic medicine included the practice of bloodletting, too. For more than twenty-five hundred years, patients were bled for every ailment imaginable (and some that were frankly imaginary) — yet there was never a shred of evidence that it did any good.

Even as blood’s “magical” powers were transformed by modern science into a component of human anatomy that could be therapeutically transfused, perverse mythology still outweighed reason. Blood prejudice has been used to exclude and include. “Royal” blood was once held in special regard. The Nazis refused transfusions from non-Aryans and thus condemned their armies to constant shortages. During World War II, the American military shamefully separated blood stocks from black and white donors.

Just before World War II, viable methods to collect and store blood and to separate plasma were discovered. (Blood separates into three parts: oxygen-carrying red cells, white cells and platelets, and a mixture of water, salts, and proteins called “plasma.”) A technique to “fractionate” plasma into its constituent parts and the ability to freeze-dry plasma gave the Allies an major advantage over the Axis powers. And it set the stage for a global industry.

The blood industry brought life to millions in the last few decades. But distribution of blood and plasma products to millions also introduced the pathogens they carried. In the 1970s, blood-related hepatitis rates soared. As this problem seemed solved, another virus — HIV — brought its taint. Blood-borne hepatitis C became another health crisis.

Modern science taught us that blood’s true magic lies in its ability to help heal. We’ve outgrown the notion that vampires could feed on our blood or that a werewolf’s bite would turn us into a lycanthrope. We no longer drink blood to acquire strength or bathe in it to restore youth. But the horror of HIV and other blood-borne viruses brings us back to the idea of blood as the bearer of death and “bad humors” back into our cultural consciousness.

A new reading: an old fear from our books of blood.

Here in NEOhio, we have one of the best public radio stations, well, in the world. Connected to Kent State University, you can listen to it over a wide region, on HD radio, or online from anywhere with an Internet connection. They have three channels: Classical and NPR (and other) programming, all-news, and folk music featuring “Folk Alley.” (And don’t get the idea that by “folk” they mean any narrow definition.)

With Spooky Sounds from Folk Alley you can listen to their Scream Stream online for a limited time only at www.folkalley.com/music/halloween. As they put it: Before there was Bob Dylan or Pete Seeger, or even Woody Guthrie, there were folk songs that were dark and gritty and filled with murder and mayhem. Perfect for Halloween! These wicked and tragic tales form the base of Folk Alley’s Scream Stream – five hours of spooky songs filled with ghosts, witches, graves, blood, goblins and more scary stuff. Warning: Folk Alley is not responsible for anyone foolish enough to listen to the Scream Stream alone or in the dark! It’s just too frightening!

I highly recommend a listen!