Pumpkin night
One evening, newspaper on the floor, everybody's hands cold.
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Carve a deliberately stupid one
A pumpkin eating a smaller pumpkin. One with your own face. The joke lasts a week on the porch.
No knives, no gut-scooping, lasts three times as long. Black and white only looks far better than it should.
Nine pumpkins on the steps in three sizes beats one carved one. Not one of them has to have a face.
Roast the seeds while you carve
The bit everyone forgets and nobody regrets. Salt, oil, hot oven, eat them straight off the tray.
Make the house weird
What the street sees, and what you have to walk past at night.
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Twenty minutes, costs nothing, and a dozen of them in a dark window is better than anything you can buy.
Tissue over a ball of newspaper, tie at the neck, two dots for eyes. Thread rather than string.
Make gravestones for the lawn
Cardboard, grey paint, and names you have to read twice. The jokes are the point.
Send bats up the stairwell
Black card, one bat shape traced forty times, each one a little higher than the last. Indoors, where you will actually see them.
Put one wrong thing somewhere
Not a decoration — a single thing slightly out of place that nobody mentions for three days. October's best trick.
Make something together
Kitchen table things. Forty minutes, ends up on the fridge.
Cut shadow puppets
Half an hour of making. An hour of pretending.
Ramjchandran · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Go and get the good leaves
The maples go first and they go fast. Press them in a heavy book and they last until Christmas.
Make something out of the leaves
Glue them onto paper as animals. It is forty minutes at a kitchen table and it ends up on the fridge.
White wool, drawing pins, one corner. Easier than it looks and children will keep adding to it for a week.
Draw each other's monsters
Everyone describes one, somebody else draws it. The misunderstandings are the good bit.
Everyone adds three. It will be terrible and it will be played every evening until November.
Cold tea, food colouring, something that fizzes. Entirely undrinkable and absolutely worth the mess.
Be something
There are only so many evenings before the 31st.
Build a costume
Start now and it is a project. Start on the 30th and it is a bedsheet.
TAPAS KUMAR HALDER · CC BY-SA 4.0
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Agree on one idea for everybody
Harder to negotiate than to build. Settle it early in the month while it is still funny.
No mask, no shop. Ordinary clothes and one detail that is wrong — too-long sleeves, a blank white eye.
Papier-mâché over a balloon takes three evenings of nothing and comes out better than anything plastic.
9 of these are opened up with what you need and the one trick that matters. The rest are ideas worth keeping.
My October
