Well when life hands you lemons, you make lemonade. Tonight that is what Jessica and I did. Except we did it with fire, and lots of it.

Yesterday evening around 9-10pm, someone or someones decided to steal all of the outdoor Halloween decorations that we had previously put up. What our Halloween display was supposed to look like can be found on Jessica’s blog. Also what happened last night can be found there too.

Our motivation to celebrate this Halloween diminished tremendously after the theft, but we couldn’t let that ruin the holiday for the kids that had nothing to do with it. So we decided to at least hand out some candy and have a bit of reckless fun while doing so.

So Jessica put a sign up explaining why we didn’t have our standard display up (as a notice to our neighbors), and we set up shop in the driveway with our front porch bench.

I sorta dressed up in my monster costume for a little bit, but I really didn’t stay in character for very long. I did manage to spook a kid or two with my glowing eyes and dragging chain, but it wasn’t long before the mask came off and I was no longer scaring the kids.

Instead, what was amazing the kids were our flaming pumpkins of death. Using a tip from extremepumpkins.com, we decided to set our jack-o-lanterns ablaze. Simply soak some toliet paper rolls in kerosene, place in the carved pumpkin, and then light it. What you get is a 3-foot tall flame that lasts about 30 minutes per roll. Once it dies out, simply shift around the ashed paper and add another flammable roll.

Jessica got some amazing pictures of our impromptu art display, some of which can be seen below:

Other photographs can be found at her post about tonight.

We also got some video footage that Jessica brilliantly compiled into this short little vid.

So while next year we probably won’t be putting up lights again anytime in the near future, at least I feel we had a semi-successful Halloween in 2006.