And, just like that, the fifth annual X-E Halloween Countdown is on! Over thirty terror-themed articles will be posted between now and Halloween night, assuming I don't burn out and take a powder by mid-October like I usually do. We have to try to stay positive.

This year, the Countdown crawls out of the ground with a short and sweet ditty on Hanging Character Heads, a series of caped monster busts with loopy strings coming out of their skulls. I picked them up at K-Mart last week, but I've since seen them at just about every store I've been in, for various prices and from various distributors. They're cheap and kooky, just like all the best Halloween things are.

You might also notice that the Halloween Jukebox has been updated for 2007, with a reorganized playlist and some new tunes. Big thanks to our pal Tummi for gathering, organizing and constructing such a deadly display of spooky songs!

And while I'm at it, thank you Mr. Brian Jacks, for taking time out of your busy schedule to once again grace us with such impenetrable web design talents. It wouldn't feel right to do my holiday site stuff without a Tummi-birthed jukebox and a Jacks-birthed layout. We still have a couple of minor design tweaks to make, which will either be finished in the next few days or forgotten about entirely by next week.

A concerted lack of planning has left me with very little idea as to what's in store for X-E's 2007 Halloween season, but I'd say it's a safe bet that we'll see a fuckton of candy, plastic goblins and at least one appearance by a wrinkly old apple that looks like Doc Brown.

One thing I'm catching off the bat on my witch hunts is that a lot of the coolest Halloween stuff out this year isn't exactly conducive to semi-lengthy Countdown articles. So, I'll be posting about many of the smaller things here on the blog. I wouldn't go so far to say that we're doing a Halloween Countdown and October Megaparty simultaneously, but now that I think about it, that sounds pretty award-winning. Let's test the waters with breath mints in the shape of pumpkins:

I would've never expected something like Ice Breakers to be able to pull off a Halloween edition, but this is a pretty good attempt. The spooktified containers hold a handful of speckled, pumpkin-shaped mints. Due to a poor choice of wording on the packages, I can't tell if they're supposed to be separate portions of orange mints and mango mints, or if they're just orange/mango hybrid mints. Taste tests do little to clarify.

"Sours Pumpkins" seems like a miswritten title, but the name fits: They are extremely sour/sours. And while my palette has grown less fond of candies that make my jaw contort in silly ways, these aren't so bad. If they weren't shaped like pumpkins, maybe they'd seem worse.

Enjoy the start of the Countdown, and I'll see you tomorrow in a not-literal way.

Posted by Matt on 09/17/2007. E-mail me!