It’s Halloween, and we’ll be celebrating by joining our neighbors across the street who cook up a large pot of chili and sets up chairs in their driveway for us neighborhood flok to come over and socialize for a few hours. It’s very nice.

A few Halloween-related links for your enjoyment:

My aunt was asking the other day where all the ghosts and spooks associated with Halloween came from. Well, consider this your Halloween primer, but I think I was right when I mentioned that the pagan festival of Samhain celebrates the darkest days of the year where the spirit world and this world are in closest proximity – hence the fascination with death and ghosts and skeletons and such.

This History Channel website has all kinds of cool facts about the various traditions associated with Halloween.

I always thought this song in its spooky, haunting oddness was perfect for Halloween. Say, I wonder whatever happened to Kate Bush?

Here’s a cool poem, perfect for the holiday:

She comes by night, in fearsome flight,
In garments black as pitch,
the queen of doom upon her broom,
the wild and wicked witch,

a crackling crone with brittle bones
and dessicated limbs,
two evil eyes with warts and sties
and bags about the rims,

a dangling nose, ten twisted toes
and fold of shriveled skin,
cracked and chipped and crackled lips
that frame a toothless grin.

She hurtles by, she sweeps the sky
and hurls a piercing screech.
As she swoops past, a spell is cast
on all her curses reach.

Take care to hide when the wild witch rides
to shriek her evil spell.
What she may do with a word or two
is much too grim to tell.

— Jack Prelutsky, The Witch

Hat tip: The Holiday Spot.

Geez, I dunno, sounds more like a poem about Hillary Clinton to me more than anything. After all, when you spout crap like this you deserve to be called a witch – or worse.