For the past few years, our Halloween Jukebox has given me all the eerie audio I need to get through the season. And yet, every year, I still find myself picking up some lame Halloween "party mix" CD, either to honor a personal tradition or because I'm kind of an idiot with money.

You know what these albums are like. You've all owned at least one of 'em. Filled with classic Halloween songs (or at least borderline Halloween songs) performed by random faceless studio acts and stuffed with horribly out of place sound effects, they've been a staple of my Halloween experience for as long as I can remember.

The track listing is always the same, the CD cover art is always hokey, and there's always at least one song performed with such a vigorous level of cheese that you feel shame while listening to it even when nobody else is home. I love these albums and I always will. They inspire me to wear nylon capes that I'll never actually wear, and plan for Halloween parties that I'll never actually throw.

Whatever. Anticipation is 9/10ths, and if some ridiculous CD featuring a vampire wearing candy corn fangs on the cover can help fill my October with luscious daydreams, I see no problem with spending $10 to hear the Jumping Jam Jeewillies' take on Love Potion #9.

During that recent outing to the Spirit store, I picked up a few packages of Halloween party favors, which Spirit has dutifully wrapped in neat black nets with creepy header cards. They're pretty steep in price (a handful of rubber mice was selling for seven bucks), but the quality level is awesome.

Spirit carries everything from severed fingers to plastic bats in this style of packaging, but I think the two batches I chose stood high above the rest: Monster Finger Puppets, and FLIES!

The "Monster Finger Puppets" are truly tingle-worthy. You get a bag of 20 for five bucks, and if my math is right, this means that each finger puppet cost me a quarter. Not bad. They're the ultimate vending machine prizes, and they cost not a drop more than even the shittiest vending machine prizes. The puppets are really ghoulish, with grey/green skin and all sorts of pleasant zombie features.

Course, the real litmus test of any finger puppet is whether its manufacturer took adult consumers into consideration. I can confirm that the puppet holes are indeed large enough to slip over adult fingers. It might take a little effort, and your fingers might make the monsters bulge like those weird red guys from Dig Dug, but whether you're five or fifty, you can put on a stupid puppet show all the same.

You might not think that a bag of FLIES is as cool as a bag of undead finger puppets, and...yeah, you're right. They're definitely not as cool. But then, there are few things cooler than green zombie heads with exaggerated arms who slip over your pinkies and dance at your discretion. Still, for the same price as twenty of those amazing puppets, you get forty flies. Forty flies! A bargain and a Scattergories victory!

The flies are of the impossibly oversized variety, which is the leading reason why I bought them. They're a bit more misshapen than I could notice when they were piled in a black net, but it's not like I had much use for rubber flies in perfectly natural poses.

I'm not sure where my 20 Monster Finger Puppets and 40 FLIES will be in a year, but I'm glad they're here now.