Halloween is just around the corner, so preparations of the Mausoleum de Atkins have begun. Yesterday’s total at the party store: $170. We take our Halloween seriously around here.

Well, not all of us do. For me and Zoe, Halloween is our favorite holiday. We decorate the house, there are weeks of costume deliberations, trick or treating is elaborately planned, jack-o-lantern designs are carefully selected… We like us some Halloween. But Beth doesn’t. Beth is, in fact, the Halloween Grinch. Despite her (or to spite her?), the decorating began today.

Zoe spent the day field-testing her Spiderella costume and was kind enough to pose next to all the decorations for me. First we have the tall gravestone:

This will go in our courtyard graveyard, along with the other headstones from last year that I can’t find right now. I’m going to put together a few dead bodies crawling out of their graves, and the whole thing will be creeped-up by the fog machine I picked up at the party store. Pictures of this will come after I set it all up next weekend.

Then there’s the door decoration Zoe picked out:

The rubber tongue was a key consideration in her selecting it:

I found myself strangely attracted to it. We got along very well; I think maybe we have a future together:

I should probably also mention that the dogs will be dressing up too. In Beth’s defense, she’s the one who went out and got the costumes for them, so she’s only half-Grinch, I guess. Courtesy of Beth, here’s Suki in her costume. She’s even less thrilled about it than she looks:

I couldn’t get Billy to pose properly for his picture, so you’ll have to trust me when I tell you it’s a lovely headband with a little vampire bat that sits right between his ears. He keeps scraping it off on the floor, I don’t know why.

When you’re decorating the house, it’s almost a law that you have to use that cheesy stretchy spiderweb stuff, isn’t it?

We think the spiderwebby stuff looks best if you don’t stretch it all out evenly, so there’s clumps of it that make it look like cheesy stretchy spiderweb stuff. You get more of a white trash Halloween effect that way, which is nice.

And the piece de resistance is the feather in the cap of that white trash look — the huge half-assed spiderweb nailed to the tree by the front door:

Yes, we’re unreasonably proud of this piece. I especially like how it looks like it was made out of strips of torn bedsheets … because it was! Also, the way it hangs there loosely, looking nothing like a real spiderweb, is very pleasing to the eye. And the crowning glory of it, of course, is the skeleton dangling from the bottom with the spider positioned to begin snacking on its head. That was Zoe’s idea. I’m so proud.

So that’s the state of the Halloween preparations today. I’ll be in Fresno all next week but will be coming home over the weekend to carve many pumpkins and put together the dead bodies for the graveyard. I’ll post more pictures then, maybe even with the fog machine on.

Oooooooohhhhhhhhh!!! Boo.