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Some tricks and some treats
Oct. 1st, 2021 03:52 pmAs part of mini-project “Clear some of my spooky books of the shelf this spooky season,” a subproject of project “Read at least 25 books I’d already owned by December 31, 2020 in 2021” I decided to pick up an extremely cute little orange-and-black volume I’d bought in a fugue state at Witch City Wicks last October called Llewellyn’s Little Book of Halloween, by Mickie Mueller.
At its most useful, this is basically a party planning book. It has some light edutainment about the history of Halloween and the background of various Halloween traditions, but most what it’s got is cocktail recipes, movie recommendations, and party tricks, including some easy low magic that you can use to get yourself and your friends in the Halloween spirit (or summon some Halloween spirits, depending on how hardcore you are). It’s full of cute illustrations of ghosts and cats and swirly spiderwebby patterns, and it will look lovely on my shelf of witchy shit next to the old-timey glass bottles and all my tarot decks.
For some reason, this thing took me 10 days to read. Some of that is because it has been a busy 10 days, full of things that did not involve getting any long stretches of uninterrupted reading time, but that was made worse by the sort of disjointed novelty book aspect of the book--it’s not really meant to be read cover to cover as a single narrative; it is just a compendium of things you can reference. This annoys me even though the only actual criticism I have of the book is that it refers to smoke cleansing with sage as “smudging” a couple of times and, come on, we should know better than that, it’s just smoke cleansing.
Anyway, if anyone wants to make opal hush cocktails this spooky season, hit me up because I have a recipe I want to try!
At its most useful, this is basically a party planning book. It has some light edutainment about the history of Halloween and the background of various Halloween traditions, but most what it’s got is cocktail recipes, movie recommendations, and party tricks, including some easy low magic that you can use to get yourself and your friends in the Halloween spirit (or summon some Halloween spirits, depending on how hardcore you are). It’s full of cute illustrations of ghosts and cats and swirly spiderwebby patterns, and it will look lovely on my shelf of witchy shit next to the old-timey glass bottles and all my tarot decks.
For some reason, this thing took me 10 days to read. Some of that is because it has been a busy 10 days, full of things that did not involve getting any long stretches of uninterrupted reading time, but that was made worse by the sort of disjointed novelty book aspect of the book--it’s not really meant to be read cover to cover as a single narrative; it is just a compendium of things you can reference. This annoys me even though the only actual criticism I have of the book is that it refers to smoke cleansing with sage as “smudging” a couple of times and, come on, we should know better than that, it’s just smoke cleansing.
Anyway, if anyone wants to make opal hush cocktails this spooky season, hit me up because I have a recipe I want to try!