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Halloween

5 Ways to Celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Hocus Pocus

Did you know that 2018 marks the 25th anniversary of the cult classic Halloween film, Hocus Pocus? It’s been a favourite in my family for as long as I can remember and I look forward to it every October. We’ve been ticking just about everything off on our Family Fall Activities List and have been making the most of this fun time of year, but one of the last things on our list is watching Hocus Pocus. With less than a week left until Halloween, I’ve put together five fun ways to celebrate 25 years of the magic of Hocus Pocus!

 

1. Have a Hocus Pocus movie night

Every October we like to make a big bowl of stovetop popcorn and watch Hocus Pocus together. It really is a great mix of adventure, comedy, magic and good old fashioned family fun. Lucy is still too young to see it, but our newborn Rosie was able to join us this year, as she slept through the whole thing at only twelve days old, ha! I look forward to being able to share it with our girls when they’re a little older.

 

2. Visit the Hocus Pocus Filming Locations in Salem

hocus-pocus-tour

Five years ago, Garrett and I took a road trip to Salem, Massachusetts in October to enjoy all the Halloween fun, and while we were there I put together a Self-Guided Walking Tour of the Hocus Pocus Filming Locations. Over the years, I’ve heard from people who worked on the film, others who used to live in Salem, folks from all over the world who plan to visit it and I’ve even heard from the children of the couple that still own the iconic house where Max and Dani lived. It’s pretty amazing how much people love this movie.

With the 25th anniversary this year, my walking tour has been featured on Apartment Therapy, Country Living, Delish and PureWow among others. It’s been great to see it reaching so many new people. You can read more about our Salem trip here and here.

 

3. Make Batty Cupcakes

Who doesn’t love a fun and festive Halloween treat? These Batty Halloween Cupcakes. would be perfect for your Hocus Pocus movie night. The chocolate bats were my favourite part to make – and you could create any shape you’d like from ghosts and bats to pumpkins and cats.

 

4. Rock a Sanderson Sisters T-Shirt

How cute is this Hocus Pocus themed t-shirt? There are some great designs out there like this one and this one. They’re perfect paired with jeans and a plaid shirt for a casual fall look.

 

5. Carve a Black Cat Pumpkin for Thackery Binx

Lucy is so proud of all the pumpkins she grew in her patch this year. We’ll be carving up a whole bunch of them for Halloween night and I love the idea of making some to commemorate the movie. Thackery Binx, the black cat who was really a boy, was always one of my favourite characters in the movie. I definitely loved the idea of having a talking cat for a pet, just like Thora Birch’s character Dani did.

I stumbled upon this easy Black Cat pumpkin carving pattern from BandofCats.com and this more detailed Winifred pumpkin carving pattern from PumpkinPile.com

However you plan to celebrate this frightful time of year, I hope you have a spooktacular Halloween!

 


Autumn Fall Travel Halloween Road Trip Travel

Salem, Massachusetts – A “Hocus Pocus” Self Guided Walking Tour

Update: This is a self-guided walking tour that I put together after our trip to Salem in October 2013, which just happened to be the 20th anniversary of Hocus Pocus. You can read more about our trip The Witch City and Historical Town. We are not running a tour (although I would love to spend all of October in Salem talking to people about film!). If you’d like to take a tour of Salem, there are many great guides out there. You can also check out my post on the Canadian town where Gilmore Girls was first filmed and the house built for Practical Magic. Happy Hauntings!

Hocus Pocus is one of my all-time favourite Halloween films. It was the right mix of funny and scary when I was a kid and I can still appreciate it to this day. From the outstanding costumes to the beautiful locations and spectacular sets – it really is a great film to watch this time of year. It’s hard to believe that 2013 marked its 20th anniversary!

Starring Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Nijimy, Hocus Pocus tells the story of the Sanderson sisters – three witches with a taste for children who are hanged during the Salem witch trials. After 300 years, the witches are accidentally resurrected on Halloween night by Max, a teenager who wasn’t feeling the Halloween spirit until now. It’s up to Max, his sister Dani, his high school crush Allison, a friendly zombie and an immortal cat named Binx to put an end to the witches’ reign of terror once and for all.

While Garrett and I were in Salem, Massachusetts this weekend, we took our own little Hocus Pocus tour, visiting many of the real locations that were used in the film.

The “Hocus Pocus” Self-Guided Walking Tour

Max & Dani’s House – 4 Ocean Avenue

You can’t do a Hocus Pocus tour and not go see Max and Dani’s house. Built in the 1870’s, this house has become a tourist attraction of its own since the release of the film. We weren’t the only ones on the street that day taking pictures.

 I think that every kid who grew up in the 90’s wanted their own lookout tower like Max.

The stairs were in his room, leading up to the tower. Perfect place to be a sulky teenager full of angst. Nice tie-dye t-shirt too.

Later in the film, after seemingly destroying the witches in their high school’s kiln, Max and Allison open the Sanderson sister’s creepy spell book in his room. Before you know it, a beam of light shoots into the night sky, lighting a beacon for the witches to come and find them.

 The tower was destroyed as the witches fly off into the night with Dani.

A painting of the house can be seen in the background of this scene with Max and Dani’s parents.

I always wonder where props like that end up!

Allison’s House – 318 Essex Street

The exterior scenes of Allison’s house were filmed at the Ropes Mansion. Built in the 1720’s, this Georgian Colonial mansion is rumored to be haunted. It’s now owned by the Peabody Essex Museum and open to the public.

In the film, the house was decorated for Halloween with pumpkins, hay bales and candles.

We didn’t go into the house when we were there, so I’m not sure if it was used for the interior shows of Allison’s parents’ party. Often the interior shots of films are done on a sound stage made to look like the house.

Old Town Hall – 32 Derby Square

Used as the exterior location of the party that Max and Dani’s parents went to, Old Town Hall dates back to 1816 and is the oldest surviving municipal building in Salem. The hall currently houses the Salem Museum. and productions of the plays Cry Innocent and History Alive.

During the end credits, all the parents in town can be seen leaving the building, exhausted after dancing all night under Winifred’s spell.

Thackery’s Village – Forest River Park

The opening village scenes from 1693 were recreated in the Salem Pioneer Village in Forest River Park, just one block away from Max and Dani’s house.

The village was built in the 1930s as a set for a play series in the park, but after the interest in it continued, the city reopened it that year as a museum. It was the first living history museum in the United States and gave visitors a look into the lives of early settlers.

In the opening credits, you can see Thackery Binx (not yet turned into a black cat) walking through the village looking for his sister.

He and his friend go running out of the village into the woods, looking for his sister who they find at the Sanderson sisters’ cottage, which was built on a Hollywood sound stage. (More on that below)

There were a couple more locations in town that we missed while we were there, but are worth checking out if you visit Salem.

John Bailey High School – Phillips Elementary School, Salem Commons

A year before filming began, Phillips Elementary School shut down, making it the perfect location for the fictional John Bailey High School.

This is where we’re first introduced to Max and Allison, and where they later try to burn the witches in the art room’s kiln.

The park across the street, Salem Commons, was used for the scene where Allison pretends to give Max her phone number.

Daytime Cemetery Scenes – Old Burial Hill, Marblehead

Old Burial Hill, in neighboring Marblehead was used for the day time exterior scenes. Nighttime scenes such as the resurrection of Billy Butcherson, the friendly zombie, were done on set.

Old Burial Hill is one of the oldest cemeteries in America, founded in 1638 and contains many historic Puritan graves including the remains of a victim of the 1692 Salem Witch Trials.

The Sanderson Sisters Witch Cottage (Sound Stage)

The scenes in the Sanderson Sisters Cottage were filmed on a sound stage in Burbank, California:

If you haven’t seen Hocus Pocus in a while, it’s worth a revisit. Perfect for this spooky time of year! I also recommend a trip to Salem – it’s a great town rich in American history, ghost stories and great people. I hope we can go back there again soon!


Autumn

Our Family Fall Activities List – 25 Ways to Celebrate the Season

Despite the crazy heatwave we had again this weekend, you can still feel that fall is quickly approaching here in Ontario. The leaves are beginning to change, the days are getting shorter and the birds are starting to fly South.

This is our last month or so as a family of three and I put together a list of some fun autumn activities we can do to spice up the season.

  1. Apple picking at our neighbour’s orchard
  2. Make some of our favourite apple recipes – Applesauce, Glazed Apple Pie Bars and Cranberry Apple Cinnamon Baked Oatmeal
  3. Hikes and car rides to see the changing leaves
  4. Visit a local Harvest Festival
  5. Make Pumpkin Spice Play Dough
  6. Dig out all our fall themed books (we love this one, this one, and this one)
  7. Backyard bonfire with s’mores (or bake S’more Cookie Bars)
  8. Make Pumpkin Arrangements for Canadian Thanksgiving
  9. Create a Painted Leaves Mobile
  10. Open up the windows for fresh crisp fall air
  11. Knit a Fall Scarf
  12. Watching Hocus Pocus just us adults (hard to believe it’s already the 25th anniversary and that it’s been five years since our trip to Salem when I wrote about our Hocus Pocus Self-Guided Walking Tour!)
  13. Decorate the front porch with fall planters (here it is the year we moved in)
  14. Make my sister’s Pumpkin Spice Whoopie Pies with Maple Cream Cheese Filling (or better yet convince her to make them for Thanksgiving)
  15. Plant garlic in the vegetable patch
  16. Cuddle up on the couch and watch classic Halloween cartoons with Lucy, like Ichabod Crane, Charlie Brown and my childhood favourite – Trick or Treat with Donald Duck
  17. Get lost in a Corn Maze
  18. Bake Gingersnap Cookies to give to others
  19. Swap out our summer clothes for cozy sweaters
  20. Warm up with homemade soups – Classic French Onion, Slow Cooker Butternut Squash and Parsnip Soup and Apple Cheddar Soup
  21. Visit a local Pumpkin Patch
  22. Spiced Apple Cider on the front porch
  23. Carve pumpkins (and Bake Pumpkin Seeds for Mama…yum!)
  24. Make Halloween costumes
  25. And last but definitely not least….welcome our new baby to the family!


Halloween

Excited for Halloween

There are only four days left until Halloween! It feels like it really came up fast this year. There is still so much I want to cram into these last few days. I still need to carve our pumpkins, finish up our costumes for a party this weekend and watch at least a couple of my favourite Halloween movies.

I’m still working on the dogs’ costumes too. Last year they went as DraCola and Were-Whisk. Hopefully I can get theirs done early and share them here before the big day.

Over the years, I’ve always loved making costumes for Whiskey. He is the best little dog model and as long as it is like a sweater, he is pretty easy going about wearing them. My family has even been teasing me about dressing up the chickens…which isn’t such a bad idea when I think about it.

Talking about Halloween, I’ve had a pretty funny thing happen this fall. Two years ago, Garrett and I went to Salem, Massachusetts for a little fall getaway to celebrate the Halloween season in the spookiest place we could think of.

While I was there I wrote about the walking tour we put together ourselves to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the classic Halloween family movie Hocus Pocus. In September this year, I started getting emails and messaging asking about when I was running the “tour”, how to buy tickets, where to meet the tour guide. It turns out the blog post went viral  and was shared thousands of times on social media within the span of three days. I was totally floored. Even the film’s Production Designer commented on it!  Over the six years I’ve been blogging I’ve had a few posts go viral and they’re always the ones I least suspect, but this one is probably the best. I keep telling Garrett we should go to Salem next year and lead tours because it looks like we could make a killing.

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For some last minute fun, here are some more of my other favourite Halloween posts from over the years. I can’t wait to finish carving our pumpkins so I can cook up the seeds!

 


Autumn Friday Favourites

Friday Favourites – Halloween Necklace, Road Trip Memories, Mini Cleaning Bursts and Technology Fails

Happy Friday!!! With Monday being Canadian Thanksgiving, it was only a four day work week for me – and it feels like this week has just flown by! I still feel like there is so much I need to accomplish. Do you ever have weeks like that? That you feel like you’ve done a lot but when you look back there is still lots to do?

Before I rushed out the door this morning, I wrote out a “to-do” list for tonight of all the things that I want/need to get done (like calling our internet provider, ordering new cheques online, etc)  – what a wild and crazy Friday night, right? As of right now I’m all pumped up to be productive when I get home, but I KNOW that the second I see Garrett and the pups, it’s going to be so hard to do anything but crash on the couch with them. I wish that my 10am “go get ’em” attitude stayed with me right until bedtime. It’s times like that makes me wish I drank coffee!

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Halloween Necklace: Last year Garrett gave me this necklace for Christmas, because it reminded him of one we’d seen on our road trip to Salem last October. It’s unlike anything that I’ve seen before and I absolutely love it. The twisted tree design and harvest moon are so symbolic of our trip together.

Salem Revisited: Wearing the necklace today made me realize that it was exactly a year ago today that we were making our way to Salem. I can’t believe that it’s already been a year!

We had such a fantastic time scoping out the town, doing our own Hocus Pocus tour and visiting some of the historical locations too. If you ever get the chance to go to Salem around Halloween, I definitely recommend it!

(Side note – my hair is so long here! I know I only chopped it off in May, but I can’t remember it being like this.)

We also made a quick detour on the way home to see the Keene Pumpkin Festival in New Hampshire. So very cool…and made me wish that we had something like this closer to home.

And then we rounded it out with a stop into Wilmington, Vermont. It was the only B&B that wasn’t booked between New Hampshire and making our way home, which is why we stopped there, but in the end it was one of my favourite things we did on the trip. I’d love to go back and explore Vermont some more.

Talking about the trip this week got Garrett and I thinking about where we’d like to go next. I would LOVE to take him to New York City someday (he’s never been!). I went one summer and loved it, but I think it would be fun to go in the fall or around Christmastime. It always looks so beautiful in the movies. We’ve been brainstorming ideas for either another mini weekend getaway before the holidays or right afterwards. Just 3-4 days where we can get lost somewhere. Any suggestions for something in the Ontario/Upstate New York/Michigan area?

Apple Picking (or just Picking Up): Over the Thanksgiving Weekend, my mom and great aunt headed out for a drive along the lake and when they mentioned the possibility of stopping into an orchard to grab apples, I hopped right in.

We got a couple of baskets of Gala apples for munching and McIntosh for baking, and divvied them up between everyone. It made me think of all the years that my grandfather would bring us apples from Thornbury at Thanksgiving…including the year I took a whole suitcase of them back on a greyhound!

On the way back home, we saw eight wild turkeys walk across the road – didn’t they know that this is a bad weekend for turkeys to go trotting about?

And I finished off the Thanksgiving weekend with the last sliver of mom’s pumpkin pie. So so good.

Mini Cleaning Bursts: I’m sharing this because I know that there are probably others out there in the same boat. When I’m really busy (like I’ve been this week), I try to do all the cleaning/tidying up in the apartment in little bursts. Instead of just coming home and trying to amble my way through my list, I set the timer for 15 minutes – and in that time I can ONLY be doing that one task, instead of getting distracted by other things that need to get done.

I might set it for 15 minutes and then only be picking up and putting away stuff around the apartment in that time. Then the timer goes off, I reset it for another 15 minutes and in that time I take care of the kitchen (whether it’s cleaning out a cupboard, washing down the stove or doing a load of dishes). Another 15 minutes will be cleaning the bathroom, replacing towels and quickly going through the medicine cupboard to get rid of anything we don’t need anymore. The last 15 minutes might be doing another cleaning task, like vacuuming and sweeping all the floors. If I still have time on the clock, I’ll use our spray mop to go around the place.

Sometimes I’ll do it all within an hour, but other times I might just set the timer for 15 minutes in the morning before I leave for work and see what I can get done then. 15 minutes seems like nothing, but it can make a huge difference to my sanity in our crazy little apartment.

Technology Fails: I fully intended to have the Holiday Guide up and running yesterday, but we had a bit of a mishap this week. My beloved iMac, where I do all my graphic design work and page formatting, is on the fritz. We had a power outage last weekend and it seems to have fried the computer’s power source. I’ve been looking up solutions online and tonight Garrett and I are going to attempt to open it up to take a look. If that doesn’t work, it’s going to the computer doctor tomorrow morning : (  In the meantime, I’ve been able to download all my design programs onto the laptop so that I can keep this engine rolling.

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I hope you all have a lovely weekend

…also, any suggestions for some good Halloween movies? What are your favourites?