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Sunday, December 25, 2011

Last year's Christmas




Above: Jane asks Zombie Santa about returning a severed head, while watching out for the grabby hands of Hermie the Horny Undead Elf.


I have a few last photos and stories to share about Christmas for the Voodoo Queen and I.

You may wonder if we have any traditions we faithfully observe in our home during the season, other than the usual tree-trimming and gift exchange. Well, one new tradition (an oxymoron, yeah, but I just started this tradition) is the Christmas Melting of Objects. Jane and I worked on a craft project that involved melting bits of colored plastic to make a sun-catcher.

My family has always been "crafty. I still have the ceramic dessert plates my 2nd-cousin-once-removed-from-society Edie Gein made from the ashes of her grandfather-- I use them to serve ladyfingers. But I digress. Jane and I had fun trying to liquidate old Halloween candy.

See, I had this plate of leftover circus peanuts and candy corn stuck up on a bookshelf and forgotten:

No, I don't eat that crap--it was around at Halloween time just because it's the scariest candy I know of and added to the "spooky" atmosphere. (Hey, it's a gas to have a bowl of this out when trick-or-treaters come just to see their reactions when they think that's what they are getting--but we were kind and gave out Snickers.) Anyway, having once discovered that nuking marshmallow Peeps was a blast, I decided to do it to these crappy confections.  So transferring it all to a plain paper plate, I blasted it with radiation:

And it came out looking like a "Harvest moon" with giant orange volcanic ridges on its surface. (Man, you can't easily destroy circus peanuts!) The candy became so hard I tried using it as a hammer:




After that, gifts were exchanged as part of our Christmas morning, before we went out to visit friends.

What is more appropriate for a severed head than a severed leg lamp?

It's fra-gee-lay!

And what more could Jane want than a crocheted conjoined rat?

One early  gift I gave myself was a "ghost camera," which guaranteed that spirits would be revealed on each film frame every time I took a photo with it. (I don't think specters and shades can be revealed on digital cameras-- too modern for the tastes of the old-fashioned dead.) So for the week of Christmas I took pictures at several places, hoping to capture shots of the invisible citizens of Eternity.

Except for my cropping and resizing some of them, the following images came back from the film lab just as you see them.

Here's outside my home:

Inside famous Allegheny Cemetery:




At St. John's Evangelical Lutheran Cemetery:


At Union Dale Cemetery a ghostly piper played for a flying girl...

More from other parts of Union Dale:





And on Christmas Day I used my ghost camera inside the home of friends Bill and Ariann. (I blogged about our horrorday celebrations with them here and here.)

Midget dancers once lived in their house, apparently--

And it seems there was an awful apparition in the dining room:

A  phantom was trying to interfere with Bill's carving the ham:

And to think we were all oblivious to the these ethereal, ectoplasmic holiday guests.

Here's to a haunted-yet-fun 2011!





Weird Xmas pics




Going with the low humor I'm celebrated for in cities around the globe (yeah, right!), here are a few photos to put you in the Christmas mood.




The Witch's Christmas!





Two of the most popular and linked-to entries of this blog are How to Care for Your Monster, Part 1 and Part 2 about the beloved 1970 Norman Bridwell kid's book from Scholastic.

So as a Christmas gift to TDSH readers I thought I'd share some select scans from another Bridwell book, The Witch's Christmas.

In this charming book from the same year, a young girl and her little brother are friends with a witch, whose magic makes winter and Christmas activities more fun for them.  Later, when Santa's sleigh hits a Apollo space capsule (hey, it IS 1970!) and becomes entangled with it, the witch comes to the rescue. Creating magic brooms for Santa, the reindeer, and the astronauts, she leads them all to safety and a party with the brother and sister.

A very sweet story by Bridwell, the artist and writer of the popular Clifford, the Big Red Dog books.

Enjoy the scans--click on any of the photos below to enlarge them.















Merry Christmas,
from The Drunken Severed Head!



Merry Christmas!


Classic horror stars play Santa in this interior image from a card I got in 2007 from artist and dear friend Richard Olson, whose art graces several posts in this blog.

There's Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine and Vincent Price. All as spine-tingling Kringles!

Merry Christmas to all my friends--past, present, and future, real and virtual!

Saturday, December 24, 2011

TDSH classic post: Hairy, Scary, Bavari-an Christmas

Above is a picture from Global Post on the monstrous German Christmas character, Krampus. From their web article "8 wacky holiday traditions."

Last year, I posted some photos similar to the one above, taken by a German-American friend while she was visiting the state of Bavaria. She was generous to share them with TDSH. Below is that post.

____________________________
Below are scans of pics lent by friend Steffi Staley of a Christmas parade in the German state of Bavaria, where Santa's evil sidekick Krampus, his demon friends, and witches all appear, the better to scare kids into being good. (A tradition I think is great for children-- although some disagree.)

This is a tradition that I wish would flourish here-- hey, we got the Christmas tree and Santa Claus from the Old World, why not Krampus and his kind? I live in a section of Pittsburgh that was home for the German immigrant community in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the "Pennsylvania Dutch" Christmas monster known as Belsnickel seems to have disappeared completely from Christmas celebrations here. What a shame!

















Merry Christmas!