Fall Festivities

Staff Member: Kylee Costello

With autumn right around the corner, it opens a door to fun and festive activities for the season! From attending spooky events to finding an exit in a corn maze, fall gives us many fun opportunities to experience.

During mid-September, pumpkin patches will start to open everywhere. They give us a chance to pick a perfect pumpkin for a variety of different things! Whether you want to carve yours to use as decoration or plan to bake it into a delicious treat, these patches of gourds offer many pumpkins to choose from. Either way, visiting a pumpkin patch is a fun, relaxing, and enjoyable experience.

Perhaps you are wanting a little more adventure this season. Corn mazes provide a fun and thrilling experience. Some are small and fairly easy, and others are intricate and massive. Large corn mazes may provide you with a map to use, while others require you to use your senses to find the exit. If open at night, the maze may even host a horror event, where scary characters chase you through the maze. This year, trying a corn maze will definitely give you a challenge!

While Halloween isn’t here quite yet, many events are beginning to arise. Participating in a costume contest is always fun. Usually, these events have awards for the best costume. Trunk-or-treating is another fun affair to partake in. It’s just like trick-or-treating, but instead of going from house to house for candy, you go from car to car. This allows you to fill your bucket with sweets and wear your costume early. Places such as festivals or haunted houses begin to appear too, giving you the opportunity to have a fright!

This year, fall gives us a huge selection of activities to do. Whether you want to find a pumpkin, seek an exit in a maze, or partake in a spooky event, there is a wondrous selection of fun opportunities to choose from!

Staff Member: Elizabeth Merck

In a few short weeks, the spooky season will be here with its decorated houses, colorful falling leaves, and cool breezes. To celebrate, we’ve decided to find the most popular Halloween costume among Douglas Middle School staff and students. I surveyed my fellow classmates, walked up to strangers in the halls, and struggled to find more interviewees. At times, I was looked at like a crazy person and asked “Why do you need to know?”. I continued to spend a lot of time aimlessly wandering the halls in search of more answers.

Today, I am proud to say, we have our results with 50 responses! This year, the competition is wild! In third place, we have Power Rangers, Spider-Man, Mickey Mouse, clown, and a few more childhood favorites, with one participant each. In second place, we have Winnie the Pooh, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Five Nights at Freddie’s and a couple more group costumes. And in first place, with 22 participants…drumroll, please… an “I Don’t Know”!  I’m unsure what that is, or where to find that costume, but I can’t wait to see these odd creatures!

Whether you’re looking forward to trick-or-treating with friends, eating candy, ding-dong ditching your neighbors, or staying up WAY too late watching horror movies, Halloween is sure to be fun! Can’t wait to see all of those amazing costumes!

Staff Member: Baylee Marnolejo

Have you ever wanted to watch a scary movie or a movie that reminds you of fall, but had no clue what to watch? Well then, this article is perfect for you. We all get in the fall spirit once September comes; we decorate, bake, and go to the pumpkin patch, but we still can't figure out what to watch. The real question is what genre we want to watch. 

If you love scary movies, then I would recommend the Scream movies; they have the perfect amount of horror, but not so much that you will get nightmares. I would personally recommend the 2nd or 4th Scream movies, but any of them are good. If you don’t like horror movies, I would recommend Hubie Halloween. It's more of a comedy than a scary movie, but it still has enough suspense to keep you guessing what comes next and won’t bore you in the first 20 minutes.

Of course we also have our originals like Hocus Pocus, Ghostbusters, Halloweentown, and Coraline. These are all great choices as well. Of those 4 options, I would recommend Coraline; it's an amazing movie that I personally feel you could never get bored of, but I also think the book is better because it has more detail and is a bit creepier than the movie. It's definitely worth the time to read it. The movie is definitely a safer option for kids, as the book has a lot of creepy, dark moments, so if you don’t mind that, then the book is definitely a great choice.

Staff Member: James Rontti

There are many Halloween movies, but which ones are actually good? If you want to watch something not that scary and family friendly, some choices are Hocus Pocus which is about three witches who get brought back to life after dying in the 1600s. Another movie that is family friendly is The Nightmare before Christmas. This movie is stop motion made from puppets. The Nightmare Before Christmas is about this guy that everyone from this Halloween town likes adventures into a Christmas town and returns full of joy and Christmas spirit and tries to turn the Halloween town into a Christmas town. 

Another Halloween movie that's family friendly is The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown. It's about a kid who writes a letter to the great pumpkin and waits in the pumpkin patch for him to arrive while everyone else is going trick or treating. Lastly, a good family friendly halloween movie is Casper. Casper is about a kid who is a ghost and lives in a huge mansion, but people are about to move in and discover the secrets of the house, when the daughter who’s moving into the house is throwing a halloween party.

Staff Member: Rebecca Warren

It is finally time for the spooky season! I have the perfect craft to start the season off strong. A craft stick haunted house. For this you need 9 jumbo craft sticks, six mini craft sticks, paint, yellow and white paper, a black marker, glue and scissors. 

To start you're going to paint 6 of your jumbo craft sticks in the same color to be the body of the house. Then, you're going to paint the other 3 jumbo sticks a different color. Then you are going to take your mini craft sticks and paint them all in different colors as well. Once the paint is dry you're going to cut a strip of paper that is big enough to fit across the six body craft sticks and use that to glue them together. 

Then, you are going to make a roof shape out of two of the remaining jumbo craft sticks and glue it to the house body. For the remaining jumbo stick you are going to lay it across the bottom of your haunted house. Now take 4 of the mini craft sticks and make a door frame out of them. Cut out window shapes from the yellow paper and use the marker to draw a frame on it. Glue to the house however you want. Now you are going to take the last two mini craft sticks and make them into boards that are covering one of the windows. 

Now finally, make two little ghosts to live inside the haunted house from the white paper. You can add other things to customize this house and make it perfect for you. Ta-da! Now you have made a haunted house that makes the spooky season a little less scary. Happy Halloween!

Staff Member: Alexis Pruitt

Figuring out which candy is trending this year is a must. Candy is a huge part of Halloween tradition, and most kids have a favorite type of candy. The most common and popular candy is usually chocolate, which also ranks highest in 8th grade. Out of the categories gummy/jellies, chocolate, suckers, and sour candy, chocolate won by a landslide. “I just find chocolate better,” stated Chevi R. Povrier. Suckers had the fewest votes. Lollipops and Jolly Ranchers are typically bought for school because they make less of a mess, but they wouldn't be the best option for Halloween.

Many candy companies change their shapes to fit the holiday. The company Hershey's changes its candy, such as Kit Kats, Reese’s, and Jolly Ranchers. Reese’s, one of the more popular candies, comes in many Halloween shapes, such as bats, pumpkins, and ghosts. The shape doesn't change the taste, but younger children usually find the candy more visually appealing, which makes the kids find the candy more intriguing to them. I recommend buying Halloween-shaped chocolate, such as Reese’s or Kit Kats. As you can see, chocolate is very popular, and the fun shapes just add to the appeal. Many kids enjoy it, and even adults do, too.