Is that you are Zeus for Halloween.

This was an amazingly easy costume to make, which from my perspective (the mother and chief seamstress) was key.

Outfit includes 1 toga (instructions and helpful video for tying a toga found on youtube) made from a white sheet putchased at the thriftshop for $2; a wire crown gussied up with some gold leaves purchased at a crafts store; and a gold belt made from a scrap of gold fabric I had lying around. Shoes were this summer’s sporty sandals - they still fit him or else I’d have spray-painted them gold.

We also made a lightning bolt out of cardboard and tin foil. This was shoved into the plastic pumpkin after a minute of use. Good thing it was bendable!

His other idea was to be Poseidon as depicted in the Percy Jackson books, which would’ve involved bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and sandals. Maybe a shell necklace or something. But he worried that no one would get it.

No one really got the Zeus outfit, actually. Every other kid we went trick-or-treating with was dressed as a vampire.

Scared Witless: Thirteen Eerie Tales to Tell, is by far the best read-aloud I’ve done in my career as a librarian. I found it because I knew I wanted to do scary stories the week before Halloween, and I didn’t want to do stories from the books we already had in the library since so many of the kids had already read them..over and over and over again. So I scoured the Internet for scary stories and this book was recommended - and for very good reason! Every story in the book has a “gotcha” moment - some scary, some silly - and they all worked wonderfully to scare the pants off the kids I read them to!

I really liked the silly stories in the book. “The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers” is a classic, of course, and I ended up telling it to all the kids, from pre-k to 5th grade, but “The Graveyard Voice” got gasps and screams, then groans and giggles, from the upper grades, as did “The Mysterious Rapping Noise.”

A few of the stories were of the plain old scary “BOO!” variety, like “Lost in the Dark,” one of my favorites. I really, really enjoyed reading this book to my kids, and while the stories weren’t great literature, they were great read-alouds!

The author and her husband, professional storytellers who have teamed up for other books, have a great little website: Beauty and the Beast Storytellers.

The only bad thing about this book is that all the kids wanted it after I read it! So now I’ll need another book to read next year…Any suggestions?