My favorite holiday is Halloween and has been since I was a young kid.  Something about scary stuff, monsters, and blood dripping down walls has always intrigued me.  Yes, I’m a sick puppy.

I want to pass this unnatural obsession with the macabre onto my children, which is only natural for a father.  My wife, who shares my love of the day, if not my strange attraction to vampires and ghouls, found a really cool concert given here locally, of Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

It was an outdoor event, at a cool stone amphitheatre, and it was a really cool setting.  The actors were all walking around in dressed in period clothes, they had hay rides that we went on, and they served cocoa at their little booths.

I say it was a concert because it was told mainly through song.  There was a narrator who did most of the dialogue, and the actors mainly sang their lines.  The guy who play Ichabod Crane was probably a little more dainty than I’m used to, but he got a lot of laughs from the audience.  As they built up to the climax, you could feel people getting ready for the Headless Horseman to make an appearance.

Behind the stage was a grassy field, and while the narrator told the story of Ichabod’s lonely ride home, you saw a silhouette of a black horse and a tall rider on the sides of the stage.  As the chase grew more intense, the field lit up in soft blue light, and the horseman appeared behind the stage, galloping in circles, holding his pumpkin head up high as poor Ichabod made his ill-fated way to the bridge.  It all came to a stop with a scream, a flung pumpkin, and then darkness.

My oldest son Hunter was hooked.  He sat on his grandpa’s lap the entire time, quietly watching and listening.  This is a feat of unnatural porportions; this kid doesn’t sit still that long through anything.  But my wife and I kept looking over at him, watching him leaning forward, eyes wide, watching the story unfold.  I’m not sure how much of it he grasped, but it sure kept him entertained.

This concert was a good family event (my sister Stephanie and her boys showed up, along with her oldest son Alex’s girlfriend), and it really paved the way for the harvest season.

It’s going to be a good Halloween!