This Is (or is it Was?) Halloween!

I had a really fun month of October!  Seeing as how most of my recent posts have tended to be serious and melancholy, I thought it might be fun just to do a little "how I spent my free time" update.  October is pretty awesome because it is the quintessential "Autumn" month, starting out with colorful, falling leaves and ending with the great celebration of candy, costumes, and creative spookiness that is Halloween!

The real highlight was a couple of weekends ago when I got an opportunity to travel back down to Tennessee and preach a sermon at the church my Grandaddy has attended for the past thirty years.  The church has been without a pastor for a few weeks, so I tried to provide them with an encouraging yet challenging message from Paul's parting words in 1 Thessalonians 5:12-28. Although I don't think I did justice to the full passage (I put the focus on verses 12-18... especially verse 18), I do hope that I was faithful to God and edifying to the congregation in the things that I did say about what the text demands of us.

I also got to spend that weekend with a dear friend who I hadn't seen for over four years.  My sister came home from college too, which made the days extra awesome.  We planned on watching The Nightmare Before Christmas (DVD borrowed from my good buddy Derek), but we simply waited too late and didn't have the energy to finish it.  We did, however, have time to watch the Buffy the Vampire Slayer "musical episode" (speaking as a new initiate to the franchise, it was alright but it needed more vampire slaying, IMO) and the Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space TV special.  Ah... good stuff.

I had never seen The Invisible Man (1933) film, so I was glad to pick up that particular volume of Universal's Monsters Legacy Collection once I got back to Louisville for a good price.  I've been collecting those classic monster collections over the last couple of years, and I really like them because they include the whole series of films that Universal made related to the featured monster with some very well-done bonus content.  But regarding The Invisible Man, I was REALLY impressed with the cinematography and pacing of the film.  The visual effects are ingenious and very impressive to watch even today.  I didn't even know that Claude Rains (probably best known as Louie from Casablanca) had played the part of the title character, but given the fact that the viewer never even sees his face until the last few seconds of the movie, he did a fantastic job with is role.  I think there are some important moral and theological ramifications raised by the movie's themes, but I'll save that for a future reflection.  And because the Legacy Collections have an impressive list of extras, I've still got four more sequels to enjoy later, the first of which stars Vincent Price taking up the mantle left behind by Rains.

 I didn't have any intentions of making a Halloween costume this year (I mean, I am 29-years-old for goodness sake), but my friend Joseph and I had a serendipitous moment of inspiration after watching Monday Night Football.  He said I ought to dress up as "the ghost from Charlie Brown" but I misheard him as saying "the ghost of Charlie Brown."  The wheels got turning in our brains, and after a midnight run to Wal-Mart we had most of the materials we needed to make the crazy idea into reality.

Here is the concept art:

And here's what we ended up with:

I think the levitating Snoopy ghost on a leash is was really made the ensemble complete.

And, no, we didn't go around hitting up houses for candy, in case you were wondering!  Joseph & Emily's sons Austin and David did all the Trick-or-Treating as a Ninja Turtle and a knight, respectively.  However, Joseph and I did provide some extra style for the neighborhood with our ghostly get-ups.

Earlier in the month, I decorated my room with some vintage Ninja Turtles decorations I found at a local thrift store for a mere $3:

This Pirate Splinter next to the "rusty" Mouser is my favorite of the whole bunch!

Halloween is an awesome holiday when it's celebrated right!

There were a number of other great memories I have of October '12 (like getting recruited to be a judge in a bake-off and getting to talk to Dr. David Dockery at the Louisville Union University Alumni reunion), but this post has gone on long enough.  Now it's November's time (too bad all the stores just want to get Christmas season started ASAP) and the good news is that Wreck-It-Ralph is hitting theaters this weekend!

And I still need to get around to watching The Nightmare Before Christmas before I have to get that DVD back to Derek.