31 Days of Halloween - Day 1

Welcome to my fifteenth, and final, Countdown to Halloween. While my love of the holiday has not diminished, a number of factors have led me to giving up all my ghosts when it comes to this annual event. The first one of these took place in October 2006, and serendipitously, there were a handful of other people doing this too and we became a supportive, like-minded community, and eventually turned it into an organized online event, The Countdown to Halloween , (where you can sign up to participate yourself, or simply find lots of cool blogs to check out for all of your Halloween treats and tricks). I have also stepped aside as organizer of this event. I think all of the other early pioneers of this event have long stopped participating, and I am the last holdout. I had toyed with trying to make it an even twenty years, but after the last few realized that it would only lead to a lot of stress and disappointment. Even this final year, where I'd hoped to go out with a bang with five different types of posts each day, ended up being a compromised effort, which will have three daily posts, a daily movie, a daily book, and a random post made up of what were going to be the other three categories, including some original Halloween art I made and which will be available for sale. Over the course of fifteen years, and with literally hundreds of participating blogs also osting daily each October for most of those years led me to decide that it was getting more and more difficult to offer up anything that everyone hasn't already seen. While I will continue my tradition of watching a horror movie everyday throughout October, not wanting to repeat myself here meant that if I felt like watching The Wolfman during the month of October, I couldn't. After this year I can watch whatever i want without feeling obliged to keep offering something new each day. Time commitments were the biggest factor in my decision to stop. Between work, family, and other obligations, it's harder and harder to make time to put together the material to share here. Finally, the shifting nature of what people pay attention to on the internet has made me consider that blogs now reside off a hidden back hallway of popular culture, and that most people now don't want to look past image heavy places such as Instagram and Tik-Tok. For the first few years, every post got at least a handful of comments, making it feel like the effort of putting this together was actually reaching people. In the past few years, while page visit traffic remained steady (and always much higher for October), almost no one leaves a comment anymore, so I have no idea if people actually even enjoy seeing this stuff anymore. So, now that all the whys are out of the way, onward to the treats. While, this final Countdown is not all that I wanted it to be, I still managed to pull together some full size candy bars to hand out, including original art which will be made available for sale the day it is posted over at my store. I will have three posts up every day, so keep checking back. Also, if you like monsters, my companion blog, The Grim Gallery, not only has images of monsters from movies, art, and popular culture up every day through October, but every day of the year. The Grim Gallery is now in it's tenth year, so there are plenty of monsters for you to find just by scrolling through the old posts. Speaking of which, I have 15 years of old Countdown posts that you can investigate, if you wish tom do so, by clicking on the month of October under each year in the Blog Archive to the right. Grab a mug of hot apple cider, or pumpkin spice latte, slip on your mask and let the month of Halloween begin.