I'm not sure which is scarier: Halloween or NaNoWriMo. :-D

Did ya know...

~ We didn't really celebrate Halloween in the Philippines...not while I was growing up anyway. We knew about Halloween, but there was, sadly, no trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. They have Halloween now. Lucky little kids. I missed out big time when I was young. *sniff*




Me want candy!


~ We had different kinds of monsters we were afraid of. We called them aswangs. My mom would try to scare us so we would listen to her, or make us go to bed when it was bedtime. I mean, that's pretty counterproductive, right?

Mom says, "Go to bed so the monsters won't come after you!"

Yeah right. The aswangs will eat me while I'm sleeping.[hides in the closet; forces eyes to stay open]



~ There was a giant tree called a balete that we would have to pass every time we hike through the woods to visit my grandparents' house (which was in a pretty isolated place). My cousins (who were older than me) used to tell me to say excuse me as we're walking past so that the ogre who lived in the tree would not bother us. O_o

"I am watching you," says the invisible ogre.

~ Of all the aswangs in the Philippines, I was most afraid of the manananggal (yeah, try saying that five times really fast!). A beautiful woman by day, but at night, her body splits in half right along her stomach so that her legs get left behind as she sprouts wings and fly through the night, looking for babies and little kids to snatch up and eat. There's no use hiding as she has a wicked sense of smell. The only way to defeat her they say (I don't know who 'they' are, really. Who makes up this kind of stuff, anyway?) is to find her bottom half and destroy it so that when dawn comes, she can't transform back into her human self.

Happy Trick-or-Treating! Watch out for Spookables! ;)

This is my only costume. Har har! BOO!

 
*****

To all of you doing Nano this year, let's buddy up! I'm CherieL over there.