The 5 Days of Halloween: Day 4

It's day 4, creeps! How about some more interesting Halloween stuff, eh?
How about some Halloween trivia.

• Orange and black are Halloween colors because orange is associated with the Fall harvest and black is associated with darkness and death.
• Jack o’ Lanterns originated in Ireland where people placed candles in hollowed-out turnips to keep away spirits and ghosts on the Samhain holiday.
• Pumpkins also come in white, blue and green. Great for unique monster carvings!
• Halloween was brought to North America by immigrants from Europe who would celebrate the harvest around a bonfire, share ghost stories, sing, dance and tell fortunes.
• Tootsie Rolls were the first wrapped penny candy in America.
• The ancient Celts thought that spirits and ghosts roamed the countryside on Halloween night. They began wearing masks and costumes to avoid being recognized as human.
• Halloween candy sales average about 2 billion dollars annually in the United States.
• Chocolate candy bars top the list as the most popular candy for trick-or-treaters with Snickers #1.
• Halloween is the 2nd most commercially successful holiday, with Christmas being the first.
• Bobbing for apples is thought to have originated from the roman harvest festival that honors Pamona, the goddess of fruit trees.
• Black cats were once believed to be witch's familiars who protected their powers.
• Signs of a werewolf are a unibrow, hair palms, tattoos, and a long middle finger.
• Vampires are mythical beings who defy death by sucking the blood of humans.
• In 1962, the Count Dracula Society was founded.
• To this day, there are vampire clubs and societies with people claiming to be real vampires.
• There really are so-called vampire bats, but they're not from Transylvania. They live in Central and South America and feed on the blood of cattle, horses and birds.
• Many people still believe that gargoyles were created by medieval architects and stone carvers to ward off evil spirits.
• Halloween is on October 31st, the last day of the Celtic calendar. It was originally a pagan holiday, honoring the dead. Halloween was referred to as All Hallows Eve and dates back to over 2000 years ago.
• If you see a spider on Halloween, it is the spirit of a loved on watching over you.
• Worldwide, bats are vital natural enemies of night-flying insects.
• The common little brown bat of North America has the longest life span for a mammal it's size, with a life span averaging 32 years.
• In about 1 in 4 autopsies, a major disease is discovered that was previously undetected.
• The Ouija Board ended up outselling the game of Monopoly in its first full year at Salem. Over two million copies of the Ouija Board were shipped.

Tomorrow is it, creepers. The Big Day. I'll have my own, special list for you the. Until then, keep yourself content with these interesting places to visit:

• Find a witch near you.
• A handy guide to demonology: here and here.
• American Scary, a history of the tradition of horror movie hosts.
• The possession and subsequent exorcism of Robbie Mannheim inspired William Peter Blatty to write The Exorcist.
• Watch episodes of Rod Serling's Night Gallery online at NBC.com.

The 5 Days of Halloween: Day 2

Welcome to Day 2 here at Xemnu. Today we're going to focus on cartoons! I am admittedly a cartoon junkie, so it's only fitting to provide you a list of (my) Top 10 Halloween (or related) Cartoons. Enjoy!

10. Flying Sorceress (Tom and Jerry) - 1956


9. Trick or Treat (Donald Duck) - 1952


8. Transylvania 6-5000 (Bugs Bunny) - 1963


7, Vincent (Tim Burton) - 1982


6. Bewitched Bunny (Bugs Bunny) - 1954


5. Night on Bald Mountain (Fantasia) - 1940


4. The Halloween Tree (Ray Bradbury) - 1993


3. Treehouse of Horror (The Simpsons) - 1990 to the present


2. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Disney) - 1949


1. It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (Charles Schultz) - 1966

The 5 Days of Halloween: Day 3

Welcome, creepers! So glad to have you back on day 3. Now that your appetite is whet, are you finally getting in the mood for Halloween?
On day 1 we talked a little about the symbolism of Halloween, specifically about the Jack O'lantern. But did you ever wonder why we get candy? Why we go door to door and trick...or treat?
Times were much simpler when Xemnu was a little monster-tot, let me tell you. Each Halloween I'd dress in my best costume and march out the door with a bag (or pillowcase, on those years I felt particularly ambitious), usually with a parent or older brother. It was a different time. A time when you'd easily see 50 or even 100 kids in your neighborhood Trick-or-Treat-ing. And almost everyone had their porch light on so you'd know there would be candy. By the bucketful.
Now, sadly, it's usually community-sponsored 'events' like a trunk-or-treat where parents can shove their little tykes through a cattle conveyor for candy. It makes me a little sad and it takes away some of the magic from the holiday. But I digress.
Curious myself, I found a nice and succinct history, if you will, of how and why we came to trick-or-treat on Halloween at About.com:

Obvious similarities suggest at least a notional link between the present-day Halloween custom of wearing costumes and going trick-or-treating and the medieval practices of "mumming" and "going a-souling" on the eve of All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (November 2). Mumming took the form of wearing costumes, chanting or singing, play-acting, and general mischief making, while souling entailed going door to door and offering prayers for the dead in exchange for treats, particularly "soul cakes."

Another possible antecedent was the British custom, dating from the 1600s, of youths wearing masks and carrying effigies while begging for pennies on Bonfire Night (also known as Guy Fawkes Night), the November 5 commemoration of the so-called Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament in 1605.

Interestingly enough, though, by the mid-1800s when Irish immigrants brought the holiday to North America, the customs of mumming and souling were all but forgotten in most of Great Britain. Americans by and large had no idea who Guy Fawkes was, let alone why anyone should go begging for "pennies for the Guy." And despite the fact that whatever was left of the October 31 observance had somehow achieved a permanent spot on the American holiday calendar by the turn of the 20th century, there's no mention in published sources of "trick-or-treating" or anything resembling it before 1939.

One does find mention — many mentions, in fact — of unrestrained pranksterism and vandalism in connection with Halloween festivities in America from the late 1800s on, thus one current theory holds that trick-or-treating was contrived by adults to provide an orderly alternative to juvenile mischief.

Whatever its precise origins, trick-or-treating was an established Halloween tradition by the 1940s and remains so to this day.

And that's about as good an explanation as we're going into for today! Hang around creeps! We're almost there!

Links of Interest:

Doombuggies.com - a website devoted to Disney's Haunted Mansion attraction.

In case you needed to know what a zombie apocalypse is. Here is how to survive it.

The complete movie Night of the Comet on Youtube.

The Ethnobiology of the Haitian Zombi, by Wade Davis. At Amazon.

The 5 Days of Halloween: Day 1, Part 2

Okay. This is an emergency update! I just found this incredible footage of what appears to be (are you ready?) someone talking on a cell phone at the premiere of a Charlie Chaplin movie in 1928!
Since this is sufficiently weird, I thought it certainly belonged on the blog. Watch the video and decide for yourself. It sort of defies logic.