Punkinhead
My mother loved Halloween.
My earliest childhood was in San Jose, California, and they took Halloween very seriously there. They decorated like crazy, sometimes so elaborately and realistically they actively scared the smaller kids. I remember one year my mom made this graveyard for our front yard. She cut twenty large pieces of styrofoam into various tombstone shapes. She covered them all with spackle that she mixed with black and gray paint to make them look like stone. And she burned "engravings" into them-- names, symbols, the occasional R.I.P. She used a woodburning tool, which she admitted later was probably a terrible idea because of the fumes from the melting plastic, but it let her carve quickly with a high degree of control. And the stones were all in the names of various figures from pop culture. I don't remember most of them, though they were all pretty clever. What were they? I seem to recall Dick Tracey was one of them. Horror figures-- Dracula, Victor Frankenstein. I can picture the one she made for Swamp Thing very vividly. It has SWAMP THING burned across the top, and a neat little stylized symbol of a hand reaching up out of a swamp.
She set them out in our yard at semi-regular intervals. She strewed around dead flowers and fake spiderwebs. It looked amazing. I wish we still had them.
She also couldn't pronounce "pumpkin" properly. She said "punkin." It makes me smile.
My earliest childhood was in San Jose, California, and they took Halloween very seriously there. They decorated like crazy, sometimes so elaborately and realistically they actively scared the smaller kids. I remember one year my mom made this graveyard for our front yard. She cut twenty large pieces of styrofoam into various tombstone shapes. She covered them all with spackle that she mixed with black and gray paint to make them look like stone. And she burned "engravings" into them-- names, symbols, the occasional R.I.P. She used a woodburning tool, which she admitted later was probably a terrible idea because of the fumes from the melting plastic, but it let her carve quickly with a high degree of control. And the stones were all in the names of various figures from pop culture. I don't remember most of them, though they were all pretty clever. What were they? I seem to recall Dick Tracey was one of them. Horror figures-- Dracula, Victor Frankenstein. I can picture the one she made for Swamp Thing very vividly. It has SWAMP THING burned across the top, and a neat little stylized symbol of a hand reaching up out of a swamp.
She set them out in our yard at semi-regular intervals. She strewed around dead flowers and fake spiderwebs. It looked amazing. I wish we still had them.
She also couldn't pronounce "pumpkin" properly. She said "punkin." It makes me smile.