Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Balloon Floats

My favorite Thanksgiving day activity...other than stuffing my face, is watching the balloon floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade!

Most of the rest of the parade (the music on the floats is always unbelievably horrible!) is never as impressive as the balloon floats.  

I believe this cutie was brought out of "retirement" a few years ago.

Yes!  Halloween represents!

Some of my favorite modern day balloon floats are Tim Burton's B. Boy, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Snoopy, and Paul Frank's Julius.

I wish I owned that dinosaur one...I would keep it tethered in my front yard for decoration during the off times that I wasn't having it float above my car as I drive around town.  

Amazing Reynolds Wrap

I love multi- functioning items!  Reynolds wrap can be used for baking and cooking as it is primarily intended.  But it also can help you check out your appearance while you hustle it in the kitchen! It can even become a bit of a magic mirror and show you as you would like to be seen...say with a nifty chef hat atop your noggin! 

Hey good lookin'... What you got cookin'?

Best mat you ever sat at!

 I bought this partial pack of disposable placemats a month or so from the thrift for 25 cents.  I didn't buy them for the fact that they could very well be the "best mat you ever sat at!" claim... I bought them for the adorable graphics!

 Cute little 31 cent face!

 On the back is the whole Scott fam, looking just as cute!

 Love the speech bubbles giving the key selling factors.  

 And then off to the right bottom is a bonus cutie kid!  And look! There are matching napkins and in an array of coordinating colors!

Here is an image of just the mats.

These are the turquoise ones, even though the picture color looks pale blue.  

The copyright on these is 1960. 

Coolerator Cutie!

It features a Crisp-o-lator! and a butter-saver!  

It's so cute I would like to buy several and use them as closets and storage cabinets in every room of the house!  Great for summer clothes if you want to chill them up a bit before putting them on!  

Why does butter need saving though?

Halloween 2013...Beatniks!

 Like, this Halloween we went as Beatniks, you dig? 

 We, cool cats, decided to make the scene at a way out java hole for a wild pre-halloween hootenanny.  What a gas!

 We wailed a bit, but so not to be headed for crashville...

  We got our kicks and we had to like split, man... we had Squares to like beat out for candy, you dig? Trick or treating! It's crazy, man, crazy!

The idea for us to be Beatniks this year came from Ned Flanders' parents on The Simpsons':

"Oh, man! Ned spilled ink all over my poems. He's a real flat tire, I mean a cube, man. He's putting us on the train to Squaresville"  

We found a few "totally with it" vintage beatnik ads and images while searching the nets while noodling out our get ups:

We came up with a few crazy accessories to like tote around....a set of bongos, a cigarette holder, our own coffee cups, portable jazz music and "Frankie" the cat from the beatnik film 'A Bucket of Blood', 1959:

A frustrated and talentless artist finds acclaim for a clay covered dead cat (with a knife still stick in it) that is mistaken as a skillful statuette. Soon the desire for more praise leads to an increasingly deadly series of works.

We had most of the threads on hand, PB just had to grow himself a Goat!

All night, we snapped our fingers to the crazy beat and spouted off random poetry in a beatniky slow voice:
" Hey Andy...Why don't you be handy and like give me some that candy"

in place of the regular "Trick or Treat".

Catch ya on the flip side Daddy-O!
We got a bongo drum full of chocolate to like chow down on man!

Halloween Continues!

Every year at our house, Halloween decorating starts in Sept and continues to stay in place into Nov.  If Christmas can linger for several months at the stores then Halloween certainly deserves the same respect.  So, MHICTY is going to have several posts with the date as Oct 31 in observance,even if it's November.

Take advantage of the Halloween items/candy on clearance and have a post-Halloween celebration too!  Make candy bark from the leftover Halloween candy!  Carve a half price pumpkin!  Parade around the house in some of the rejected costume items that didn't turn out to be the big seller the stores expected!

Leave me your ideas in the comments section of ways you would continue the Halloween festivities!

Bone Soup

 For the past 4 years I have read "Bone Soup" by Cambria Evans to Pumpkinbutt's class on Halloween.  The past 2 years have been difficult to make it happen due to one teacher saying "Halloween isn't a real holiday"  and another teacher afraid someone would get offended.  But after begging, pleading and clearance from the principal the tradition has prevailed.
Let me clarify here... I don't just read them the story, there is a whole performance involved and a treat at the end. The story is a Halloween version of "Stone Soup" with imported stewed eyeballs, bat wings and frog legs, to name some of the ingredients. The main character, a skeleton-type cutie named Finnigin, is a wanderer in search of a Halloween feast.

Finnigin places a dry old bone (a magic bone!) in the town's largest cauldron and draws out the reluctant townscreatures to contribute to the soup. As each ingredient is placed in the soup in the story, I add the same item into a large plastic cauldron.   I made all the ingredient's packaging to look just like they do in the book.

With Imported Stewed Eyeballs, the soup becomes tasty...

But what flavor Bat Wings add!

 With the addition of Frog Legs, the soup is fit for a king!

And with a final dusting of slime and sludge (plastic spiders, flies, other creepy crawlies)  the soup is declared ready!

This year, instead of giving them a large cookie bone or goodie bag containing Bone Soup type items when the story is over, I decided to take it up a notch....I had them build their own Bone Soup in an edible chocolate cauldron as the story was read!

Each kid got a little zombie-hand bag of edibles... Eyes, batwings (pumpkin spice candy melt molds of bats), gummy frogs, Halloween colored sugar sprinkles with a small candy bug (slime and sludge) and of course a magic bone (a small candy sprinkle bone).

I made the cauldron cakes from this recipe.  Mine did not turn out near as cute as hers!

Here are a few of the kid's Bone Soup creations!:

This year's presentation went really well.  As I told the story and directed the kids on what to open and add next to their mini cauldrons, PB took care of the large cauldron and it's soup contents. 

And best of all, the kids and PB had a great time.  His school does not allow but a couple of parties each school year and Halloween gets bumped usually.  I try my best to make sure the kids get something since I think it's the best and most important holiday there is. (sorry Christmas...you are second place.)

Next year will be the last year we get to do Bone Soup as PB will be in 5th grade...have to make it extra spooktacular! 

As a side note, I highly recommend everyone who loves Halloween to own this book, it is a staple and has become a tradition that PB and I look forward to reading each season.  

Vintage Halloween Bags

Here are some images of vintage Halloween treat bags that can be printed and added to plain white bags

to spook them up a bit, just in time for trick or treaters!

These images are great for making banners out of as well. Or printed on to fabric and made into throw pillows....ideas for next year!

Witches fingers

  We made witches fingers for a Halloween treat!  And when a few broke....

They became goblin toes!

Ingredients

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup powdered sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon almond extract

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 2/3 cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

3/4 cup almonds (whole or sliced)

1 tablespoon raspberry jam

Directions

On medium speed, beat the butter, sugar, egg, almond extract, and vanilla extract in a mixing bowl for 2 minutes or until fluffy. Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt. Add the flour mixture slowly to the butter mixture. I like to switch to a wooden spoon. I don't want to break my mixer. Refrigerate for about 30 minutes.

Preheat oven to 325F.

Take heaping teaspoon size pieces of dough and roll them into logs that are the shape of fingers. Use your hands to make knuckles and indents on the fingers (look at your own to decide where they should be placed). You can use a knife to make the indents. Place an almond on the tip of the fingers where the nail should be.

Arrange the cookies on parchment lined baking sheets and bake for about 20 minutes or until lightly golden. Let them cool for a minute then remove the almonds from the fingers and place a small dab of jam into the space before pressing the almonds back onto the cookies. 

Ellie's Halloween 2013 Costume

Ellie's costume this year is Frida Kahlo. 

I had everything needed for it already on hand.  Her rose hair adornment headband is made from scrap black t-shirt fabric with artificial roses sewn on it.  She got the dress for christmas last year from her "grandmother".

 Her uni-brow is an upside down fake mustache sticker.

Fun for Halloween!

"Crayola windows" must have been an idea submitted by a Crayola Maker that hated his mother, other children, and maybe even furniture. Hear me out....  Children, rub the entire surface of a piece of paper with ANY available household oil!  There's motor oil in the garage! Why not?  And then tape it on a window.... sorry but tape is not going to stick to oil. And guess what! That greasy mess is going to slide down the window and on to the sofa.  Mother is going to be so thrilled!

But "Crayola Ghosts" is an awesome idea and I would enjoy doing that one myself.  A fun twist would be to have each child in a classroom draw a ghost and write a spooky message with white crayon on white paper.  Then have them collected, mixed up and passed back out.  Each child would then apply black water color paint to reveal their surprise ghost and secret note.

I am not going to comment on "Scare Faces" other than .......lame.

Creepy Vulture Pumpkin

 Here is the pumpkin this year!  Inspired by a Martha Stewart design.  I had to alter the pattern and instructions a bit.  The primary cage pumpkin is suppose to very large and the vulture is made from a smaller pumpkin. My cage pumpkin is more of a medium-ish, so I had to cut off the bottom section of the cage template.  For the vulture I was not going to buy another pumpkin to just use 1/10 of it, sooo.... I improvised some.  I made the vulture out of black craft foam with skewer sticks hot glued to it's back and jabbed them into the base.

I added a few ideas and touches of my own.  I painted a spider web design  all over the outside of the pumpkin with black acrylic paint.

I also added a nest on the bottom of the "cage" made from black Halloween hay (it's like pillow stuffing just black in color) and Spanish moss.  I cut up a small plastic skeleton and placed in a picked -over-bone-pile.

I found a few pumpkins of Halloween past for your viewing pleasure:
2011
2010
2005
 I guess I didn't carve a pumpkin the other years due to a pumpkin shortage crisis?  Not sure...