Hey, Pumpkin People!

Carving pumpkins is typically the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Halloween. After all, Halloween without Jack-o-Lanterns would just be weird…and wrong, wouldn’t it? During this time of year, pretty much everybody tries their hand at carving. It only makes sense that we recognize National Carve a Pumpkin Day.

Halloween is just days away. If you haven’t carved your pumpkins yet, I suggest you get to it today—despite the fact that National Carve a Pumpkin Day is actually on Friday, October 31…

This makes less sense.

Having National Carve a Pumpkin Day on the SAME DAY as Halloween seems last-minute and after-the-fact. That’s exactly why I’m posting about it today instead of Halloween (in order to give you a little bit of time and a fair warning).

It makes a little more sense to carve your pumpkins a week or so in advance and give your neighbors a chance to see your carving handiwork. Your pumpkins won’t go bad in just a week’s time.

You can trust me—I like to go ALL OUT when it comes to pumpkin carving! MY pumpkins have already been out for a week! So get out your carving knives and find some spooky stencils to use, or you can flex your own creative muscle while you carve your pumpkin freehand.

If you have enough pumpkins, it can be a lot of fun to make a night out of it. Enjoy some apple cider while you sit with friends or family and carve away! The more the merrier for an activity like this. You can exchange ideas for faces and help each other with stencils. Also, don’t forget to save your pumpkin seeds for a delicious and healthy, roasted snack!

Thanks for reading, Blog Fans. Now go cut up some pumpkins!

- John

Good evening, Ladies and Ghouls.

Harvest time is among us and Halloween is right around the corner. It’s time to dress up like scary creatures and gorge ourselves on hard-earned candy! This is one of those holidays that comes with a lot of stuff: you’ve got carving equipment for pumpkins, candles, costumes, indoor and outdoor decorations…What great storage use of a C&N Footlocker! Celebrate this spooky holiday in style with our great C&N trunks.

Act now and get the SPOOKtacular Savings sale discount of $15 off of the Happy Camper Footlocker. You don’t want to wait too long to take advantage of this sale. It goes from now until October 26.

It’s scary how great our camp trunks are! See, we’ve grown to supply so much more than just footlockers, but that’s how we got our start. Over the years, we changed a lot of things: our focus, the products we offer, our NAME, but we still construct every footlocker trunk that we sell right here in our own facility, branding them with our C&N Footlockers emblem.

Spacious, the Happy Camper will give you no concerns about conveniently and safely storing your holiday decorations, costumes, and tools. All C&N Footlockers are made with top-of-the-line construction. We line the trunk interior with DuraWrap Liner which is water-resistant, odor-free, and virtually tear-proof.

You know what’s terrific about being an Everything Summer Camp customer?—besides EVERYTHING, of course—is the Lifetime Free Warranty we have on all of our C&N Footlockers. That means we’ll repair any one of your damaged footlockers for you, for free—guaranteed for life.

That’s right! Should your camp trunk from Everything Summer Camp—despite its unquestionably solid construction—somehow meet with some horrifying accident, we’ll repair it!

Take advantage of our SPOOKtacular Savings Trunk Sale and have a look at our trunks today! Thanks for reading.

- John

Hey, Summer Campers!

It should come as no surprise to you that people of all different walks of life enjoy going to summer camp. I went to camp. Your uncle’s sister-in-law probably went to camp. Heck!—SUPERMAN himself went to camp! It’s the natural thing to do for boys and girls of earth (and Krypton).

As was discussed on a recent Blog post, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster may have introduced the world to the one, the only, Superman…but it was one Christopher Reeve who brought the legend to life. However, before he ever played the man of steel, he was a summer camper, just like you!

When he was your age, Christopher went to camp along Squam Lake and amidst the White Mountains of New Hampshire at Camp Deerwood. He may have only been around ten years old when he went to camp, but it only took him that long to discover his passion for acting.

After being cast in an amateur, student play, ‘The Yeomen of the Guard’, there was no doubt in Christopher’s head, he wanted to be an actor.

It was a no-brainer for him to join the theater department when he attended college at Cornell. He acted in four plays within his freshman year and, always executing his performances with quality, he was contacted by an agent at the end of his first year.

The same agent who represented stars of the day, like Robert Redford, Richard Chamberlain, Michael Douglas, and Susan Sarandon, Stark Hesseltine was sure to make Christopher Reeve into a household name.

After convincing the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences he could do so much more at Juilliard, he transferred three year’s college credits to have his senior year at Juilliard. It wasn’t long after that, in his 26th year, that he received the lead role as Clark Kent (a.k.a. Superman) in the much anticipated film, ‘Superman’.

Unfortunately, after so many achievements in acting, directing, producing, screenwriting, and activism, tragedy awaited Christopher around the corner. In 1995, he turned 43. He was violently thrown from a horse during a customary competition in Virginia; from this, he required a wheelchair and a breathing apparatus for the rest of his life.

He founded the Christopher Reeve Foundation for people with spinal-cord injuries before his death at only 52.

Thanks for reading, Camp Fans.

- John

Hey, Halloweeners!

Halloween is right around the corner. It comes and goes so quickly; you’ve got to enjoy this time of year while it lasts, so I’ve compiled some great activities to help you have some Halloween fun this year! With ideas like these you’ll have a howlin’ good time on this horrifying holiday!

• First of all, get your house well-decorated! Having pumpkins, gourds, and jack-o-lanterns around the house—inside and out—always helps establish a spooky setting. Other decorations like ceramic figures or disturbing items to hang on the wall work well too.
  • Get crafty with decorations and make your own! When I was little, my mother and I made cool ‘Toilet Paper Roll Bats’ by covering toilet paper rolls in black construction paper, adding faces, and attaching them to invisible thread that got pinned to the ceiling. They were a lot of fun to make and my mother still hangs them today.
  • You can also make a weird wreath out of gourds. Just string them together on some wire, shape it into a circle, and hang it from your door. Add a black bow to make it extra frightening.
• You can turn the chore of raking into a fun time by stuffing your leaves into some ratty, old clothes, creating leaf people. It’s a fun, little project and it makes your neighbors do double-takes as they walk by.
  • Scarecrows are also fun to construct. Last year, I made one using just a couple pieces of wood screwed together to make a ‘t’, some curtain fabric, straw, twine, and a jack-o-lantern.
• If you’re really into Halloween and you have the right yard for the task, you can make a haunted house in your backyard for all your neighbors to cross…if they dare!
  • ‘The American Scream’ is a great documentary that features the homemade haunted houses of some people who get REALLY into Halloween! Check it out if you can. It’s great!

Hope these ideas have helped inspire you to make some decorations of your own! Don’t forget to get creative, and thanks for reading, folks!

- John

Hey, Word Lovers!

If you’re anything like me, then you love flexing your vocabulary and learning new words to build your lexicon. When you have command of the English language, you possess more power than you probably realize. Why? Because if you can deliver your thoughts and ideas with precise articulation, the world understands you better. You’re more likely to be heard when you express yourself with intelligence and clarity.

The dictionary is an excellent source for gaining lexical knowledge. It’s an obvious authority on words, concerning a slew of important information about them, like their spelling, definition, pronunciation, syllable count, etymology, and more. It’s no wonder we have a day like today, National Dictionary Day.

Dictionaries used to be books, but nowadays, the word ‘dictionary’ includes all technological modernizations such as CD-ROMs, applications on mobile devices, and resource sites online—like Dictionary.com. Basically, if you can use it like a dictionary, then it’s still a dictionary…unless it’s a thesaurus. Then it’s a thesaurus…the dictionary’s cousin.

We’ll celebrate Thesaurus Day in a few months.

Believe it or not, Noah Webster did not make the first dictionary—just the one that we all know and love. Actually, dictionaries (as far as we know) date back to 2300 B.C. The oldest dictionary ever found was a simple, bilingual wordlist of words in the Sumerian and Akkadian languages.

It took time for dictionaries to develop certain characteristics that are nothing short of customary for us nowadays. The listing order, for example, wasn’t always alphabetical. They didn’t necessarily provide such a wide assortment of information. And, thus, they had yet to yield their authoritative connotation as they do now.

We have Mr. Noah Webster to thank for his boundless efforts in creating the expanded and fully comprehensive ‘American Dictionary of the English Language’ in 1828. It took him 27 years to complete his dictionary—which isn’t really even THAT long, when you consider that he learned 26 languages in order to properly get the job done!

Have fun building your vocabularies today by looking up any words you didn’t understand in my Blog post today. I intentionally threw in some particularly big ones just for you. Thanks for reading, Blog Fans, and Happy Dictionary Day.

- John