Chaos Love: love, life, design and more.

As you might expect, Halloween is big business here in the States. It kicks off what is known as "the Holiday Season", simply because there's a big holiday festival going on for every month until the end of the year - Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas... an endless orgy of consumerism to be had! As Halloween is pretty much non-existent back home in Australia, I thought I'd give you a bit of a look at what goes on around here during Autumn... I mean Fall, he he he!

Here's the display of enormous carving pumpkins at our local supermarket. There are pallet after pallet of these jack-o-lantern's-in-waiting, all for the bargain basement price of 17 cents a pound! Christine and I bought two, one of which cost $4, so it weighs 23 pounds or over 10 kilos! We're heading over to Kim's place tonight for a night of pumpkin carving, which should be both messy and highly amusing!

This is just one of four aisles in the supermarket dedicated to Halloween-themed goodies. From all your trick-or-treat candy supplies, to costumes for kids and adults alike, to cheesy and unnecessary toys, to ridiculously overblown outdoor display pieces - it's all here for you to purchase. Just as Christmas light displays are now de rigueur both here and in Sydney, so too are Halloween displays here, complete with giant inflatable ghosts, pumpkins, spiders and spooky castles. One-upmanship over your neighbours' displays is, of course, mandatory.

On an aside, perusing these aisles led me to discover that what we call Mars Bars are known as Milky Way bars in America, and what we know as Milky Ways are called something else again... weird!!

Here's some pumpkin beer! Honest! It's on special already, before Halloween, so it may not be such a big hit. And in case you're thinking that this is the strangest Halloween beverage, you'd be wrong:

Burgerville is offering Pumpkin milkshakes! By all reports, it's actually quite delicious, sweetened with cinnamon and nutmeg, but the concept by itself is a little mind-boggling!

So, pumpkin carving tonight... I'll let you know how my masterpiece goes!

Posted in: chaosboy, united states, weirdness on October 18, 2007 at at 12:34:00 PM