Welcome to X-Entertainment’s sixth annual Halloween Countdown — your haunted hub for all things ghoulish! From now through Halloween, come back each weekday for a new spooky-themed article, covering everything from this year’s best Halloween candy to yesteryear’s worst Halloween movies. (I’ll be posting on the weekends too, but let’s consider those bonuses in case I want a day off.)

Longtime readers might be wondering why I’m doing the Countdown on the blog as opposed to the traditional packaging. Well, for one, I don’t want to repeat last year’s monumental disaster and burn out on Halloween long before it’s actually Halloween. It makes me feel all Grinchy. Plus, a lot of the junk I want to cover are dishes best served in a couple of paragraphs, and it won’t do me any favors to try to stretch everything into feature-length articles. In my old age, I’ve lost my zeal for filler.

I’m excited. I didn’t pump myself up with Halloween madness in late August like I usually do, so there’s more than enough gas left for me to spew nothing but orange and black bile for the next month and a half. I’ve already found a ton of Halloween stuff worthy of tribute, and the search has barely begun!

It’s the start of the greatest trimester of the year — a long stretch of death and darkness, followed by a turkey-laced conversion, followed by an enormous Christmas explosion. It’s my favorite time to be alive, and it’s by far my favorite time to run this site. I hope you’ll all stick around and have fun in the comments. The thought that a fair number of you count X-E among your holiday traditions is more than enough motivation for me to blow each and every paycheck on stuff I’ll take a few pictures of, write about and then never look at again.

Still doing some light tweaks here and there, but as you can see, the blog has been spookified. Big thanks to Brian Jacks for the amazing blog header. You might remember Brian from past X-E holiday designs. He’s become a pretty busy little big shot, and it took a lot of begging to get him to grace us with his talents this year. I’ve been doing these Countdowns for a long time, and it just wouldn’t feel right without one of his Photoshop jobs skulking about somewhere.

Similarly, the man/beast known as Tummi, another increasingly busy buddy of mine, sacrificed forty days and forty nights to deliver us a custom new Halloween Jukebox, now with more spooky songs than ever before! I listen to holiday music more than any other kind, so this juke goes well beyond a mere “novelty” for me. Give it a listen, and you too will lose count of how often you click that jukebox graphic between now and Halloween. (Hint: It’s near the top of the right-side column on every page of the blog.)

What can you expect during this year’s Countdown? Hmm: Toys, candy, movies, toons, contests, commercials, crafts, recipes and, if the stars align, crude sketches of ghosts who converse via word balloons. And my annual essay on why life sucks, disguised as a review of Charlie Brown’s Halloween special.

Let’s get this party started with something small. Ironically, someday, this something will be gigantic.

Just when you thought “Grow Your Own” toys peaked and were ready to tumble down the mountain, some mad scientist finds a way to top all past exhibits. A “Grow Your Own” Haunted Castle? I can’t say that it’s been a lifelong dream of mine, but I think that has more to do with me lacking an imaginative enough brain to conjure visions of something so incredible. In the end, I am mortal.

Sufficiently aided by ghost-laden packaging (a necessity to make the castle feel distinctly haunted, otherwise it’d pass as a simple medieval castle, and there’s nothing Halloween Countdownish about that), the soon-to-be-ginormous abode is rough to the touch, and it kinda smells like one of those old scented Body Shop soap balls everyone seems to have owned at one point or another.

Soap balls — is that what they were called? Maybe bath beads? They looked like big, edible marbles. Those things.

The castle is finely detailed, though I wonder how much of this detailing will be left intact after it spends days soaking and expanding in a tub of water. Course, I’m not giving my castle much of a chance of shine, as the only suitable container I could find to house its metamorphosis was a jar that formerly played host to a handful of sliced peaches.

I’m curious to see the final result, but I readily admit that this can only end badly. I’m also going to have to issue a surprising STRIKE ONE against this seemingly perfect item, as there’s no easy way to keep the castle in an upright position as it grows. It seems clear that the castle will ultimately morph into some kind of sightless octopus with red-tipped tentacles, given its sideways position and the fact that its growth is now limited to the exact mass of ten ounces worth of Polar’s peach slices.

But is that really something to complain about? A tiny haunted castle that slowly transforms into a giant, handicapped octopus? Christmas has come early.

According to the package, the castle’s alien gestation lasts for up to ten days. Mark your calendars. I’ll show you the results on 9/26. Which is evidently going to be a Friday. Hooray for Friday nights spent in ways worth bragging about.

See you tomorrow? That’s how this works, you know.

Posted by Matt. E-mail me!