Not to early to start planning for Halloween 2018

Today may be All Saints Day, but why spend anytime thinking about all those saints, especially the martyrs, and the gruesome way they died? St. Sebastian with all those arrows sticking out of him. St. Dymphna, who’s father cut her head off because she wouldn’t marry him. St. Lawrence, roasted alive. (And crying out to the pagans killing him to “Turn me over, I’m done on this side.) So: no dwelling on saints today, my friends.

And don’t for even one moment think that buying candy corn on sale at CVS today counts as planning for next year. You know full well that, between now and then, you’ll gobble that candy corn down while watching a rerun on HGTV.

Anyway, what you do want to put in the back of your mind is that, come next year, you won’t have to do any of the heavy holiday lifting that attends Halloween now that it’s become a “thing.”
Alas, it’s a day late and a thousand or so dollars short, but I do want you to now that:

Halloween whisperers are earning as much as $125 an hour to shop for severed heads, advise clients on his-and-hers costumes, and spray bushes with spider webs. (Source: Boston Globe)

Advise clients on his and hers costumes? What???? There are actually people out there too unimaginative to think Fred and Wilma, or Jared and Ivanka? Salt & Pepper Shakers? Yin and Yang? Pasta and Red Sauce? Witch and Broomstick?

And if shopping for a severed head – I assume we’re talking fake heads here – is worth $125 an hour, I’m in the wrong business.

In Chestnut Hill, personal concierge Lisa Schreider spent hours scooping out 10 large pumpkins for a driveway display, a job that left her with a modern workplace injury: pumpkin elbow.
“The original goal was to have the [clients’] kids help, but they were not interested,” Schreider said, adding cheerfully: “I couldn’t use my right arm for two days afterwards.”

Am I the only one thinking that if the kids aren’t interested in scooping out pumpkin innards – and I really can’t blame them for not wanting to deal with that messy gloop – the remedy calls for fewer (or none, even) large pumpkins for the driveway display?
Halloween seems to be a busy season for Schreider.

One client needed a last-minute pirate’s hat, another realized she didn’t have enough candy.

Gee, when folks I know need a last-minute pirate’s hat, they run out and get one. (Party City? Walmart? Pirates ‘R Us?) Ditto for candy.

And, of course, if your kids, like those little Chestnut Hill-ers, don’t want to get their hands messy with pumpkin gloop and you let them get away with that, we all know that no one in the household is going to be satisfied with the rat-ass jack-o-lantern carving that most kids (and most adults, for that matter) are capable of. A couple of triangle eyes and a snaggle-toothed grin? Even if you can manage it, that’s just BO-RING.

If you really want to do it up right, you can hire Brooklyn’s Maniac Pumpkin Carvers.I’ll admit: their work looks mighty professional. That’s because the Maniac Pumpkin Carvers are professionals. A custom, artisanal pumpkin could set you back $1.5K (shipping and handling not included).
All concierge’s don’t have fees of $125/hour. The more reasonable Kristin Cantu only charges $65. But that can add up, as it did when she was hired to find “a Soviet-style military costume for a client, a Harvard Business School graduate.”

“I did a lot of online searches, and it turns out these sorts of costumes are really hard to come by,” she said. She went to multiple stores — including army surplus shops in Boston and Saugus — and rented part of the outfit from a costume shop.

More than $1,000 later — not counting the cost of the costume itself — the client got what he needed. “He said he was a big hit at the party,” Cantu said.

I’ll just bet it was.

Anyway, in the interests of advance destressing about next year’s Halloween - what if you need a pirate hat? what if your kids won’t touch that icky pirate gloop – now you know that help is available. You only have to ask – and pay – for it.
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Thanks to my sister Kath for spying this article. (She would, by the way, make an excellent Halloween concierge. Just sayin’)