Halloween Q&A

Q: What is the most important subject a witch learns in school?
A: Spelling.

Q: Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road?
A: He didn’t have any guts!

Q: Why did the skeleton cross the road?
A: To get to the body shop.

Q: Why didn’t the skeleton go to the ball?
A: Because he had no BODY to go with.

Q: What room does a ghost not need?
A: A living room!

Q: Why are ghosts so bad at lying?
A: Because you can see right through them!

“Mommy, everyone says I look like a werewolf.”
“Please be quiet and comb your face.”

Q: When is it bad luck to be followed by a black cat?
A: When you’re a mouse.

Q: What do you get when you cross a Cocker Spaniel,
a Poodle and a ghost?
A: A cocker poodle boo.

Q: What do moms dress up as on Halloween?
A: Mummies!

Q: What do you get when you cross a snowman with a vampire?
A: Frostbite.

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Q: What do you get when you cross a duck with a vampire?
A: Count Quackula!

Q: Where do ghosts buy their food?
A: At the ghost-ery store!

Q: Why do ghosts make good cheerleaders?
A: Because they have a lot of spirit

Q: What kind of dessert does a ghost like?
A: I scream!

Q: What’s a vampire’s favorite part of the guitar?
A: The neck.

Q: Why doesn’t a witch wear a flat hat?
A: Because there’s no point in it!

Q: Who are some of the werewolves’ cousins?
A: The whatwolves and the whenwolves.

Q: Why are Venetian blinds the greatest invention in the history of mankind?
A: If it wasn’t for Venetian blinds, it would have been curtains for all of us.

Three Vampires Went to a Bar

It was late Halloween and three young vampires went into a bar.

“What will you have?” the bartender asked.

“I’ll have a full glass of warm blood,” the first replied.

“I’ll have a full glass of warm blood, too, thanks,” said the second.

“I’ll have a full glass of warm plasma,” said the third.

“OK, let me get this straight,” the bartender said. “That’ll be two bloods and a blood light?”

Thanks A Million

A 5th grade English teacher asked her class to write an essay on what they’d do if they had a million dollars. Alec handed in a blank sheet of paper.

“Alec!” yelled the teacher, “you’ve done nothing. Why?”

“Because if I had a million dollars, that’s exactly what I would do!”

 

Bad Dogma

Mom and Dad were trying to console Susie, whose dog had recently died.

“You know, it’s not your fault that the dog died. He’s probably up in heaven right now, having a grand old time with God.”

Susie, still crying, said, “What would God want with a dead dog?”

 

I scream Sunday

At the typical Christmas dinner, Mom is always yelling, “Get out of my kitchen!”

The grown kids are always yelling at their tiny offspring, “Stop running! You’ll break Grandma’s furniture!”

Dad is always yelling, “Get out of the way! I can’t see the TV set!”

The little ones are yelling, “It’s my toy! Let me play with it!”

This is why this is known as the Holler Day Season.
There were two fish in a tank. One of them said to the other: “How do you drive this thing?

 

Personal Fowl

The baby pigeon said, “I can’t make it; I’ll get too tired.”

His mother said, “Don’t worry; I’ll tie a piece of string to one of your legs and the other end to mine.”

The baby started to cry.

“What’s wrong?” said the mother.

“I don’t want to be pigeon towed!”

Finding Christ

One midnight in late winter, at age 13, I rose stealthily from my bed. Moving quietly so as not to wake my parents and three brothers, I removed a leather box from the storage cabinet built into my wall. It was filled with jewelry, watches, pens, and savings bonds—thousands of dollars’ worth of gifts. They had been given to me that summer for my bar mitzvah.

For a long time, I had marveled at these riches, great wealth for a boy in the 1960s, even in the well-to-do suburb in which I lived. From time to time, I would open the box and arrange the jewelry in its compartments, touching the rattling identity bracelets, tie pins, and cufflinks. I would silently estimate the value of the haul.

But over time, that pleasure soured and died. The truth was, I had hated my bar mitzvah. The majesty and profundity of the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony—the majesty and profundity of Judaism itself—were lost on me. Or rather, they had never been instilled in me, for the simple reason that my parents did not believe in God.

My homemaker mother was, to the day she died, as certain an atheist as I have ever met. My father, an antic radio comedian, hedged his bets a little: it was not in his nature to defy a Gigantic Invisible Jew who could give you cancer just by thinking about it. Both my parents acknowledged that they had schooled my brothers and me in Jewish practices only in service to tradition. Their motivations were racial loyalty and religious guilt, not bringing us closer to the divine. Despite our dutiful celebration of Jewish holidays, God had no living presence in our family. We did not say grace before meals or prayers before bedtime. We did not read the Bible at home or discuss morality in terms of God’s nature or his will.

This rendered our Jewish observances absurd. Hebrew school, synagogue, the whole magnificent 4,000-year-old structure of Jewish theology and tradition: Without God, what was it but an empty temple, its foundations resting on nothing, its spires pointing only toward the dark?

Done with Hypocrisy

I was a boy who insisted that ideas, philosophies, even my daydreams make sense. Before I could imagine myself as some great warrior or superhero, the fantasy needed a logical context. This was good training for a kid who would one day become a writer of adventure and suspense novels, but it also taught me that words and thoughts should have integrity. I could not rid myself of the notion that when I stood at the synagogue podium for my bar mitzvah, when I declared myself a member of the Jewish faith, I was lying, betraying my deepest sense of self.

Why did I speak words I did not believe? Why did I sing those Hebrew prayers I did not even understand? And so, that winter night, after my parents and brothers had gone to bed, I crept quietly outside with the leather box full of riches.

There, beneath the kitchen window, beside the cellar door, two garbage receptacles were sunk into a concrete platform. I knelt, feeling the rough, cold cement through the knees of my pajamas. I pressed the foot pedal to raise the lid. With my other hand, I stuffed the box into a paper trash bag sodden with coffee grounds and egg shells. I worked it deep into the debris so that it would not be discovered before the garbage men came in the morning.

With this gesture, I hoped to leave behind not only Judaism but religious life entirely. No more hypocrisy and empty show. For most of the next 35 years, I remained a philosophical agnostic and a practical atheist. No shock of revelation changed me either. I never saw a flash of light like Paul on the road to Damascus. I never heard a voice telling me to “take up and read” like Augustine under the fig tree. Jesus never appeared to me while I lay drunk in the gutter.

And yet, looking back on my life, I see that Christ was beckoning to me at every turn. When I was a child, he was there in the kindness of a Christian babysitter and the magic of a Christmas Eve spent at her house. When I was a troubled young man contemplating suicide, he was in the voice of a Christian baseball player who gave a radio interview that inspired me to go on. And always, he was in the day-to-day miracle of my marriage, a lifelong romance that taught me the reality of love and slowly led me to contemplate the greater love that was its source and inspiration.

The Joy of My Joy

But perhaps most important for a novelist who insisted that ideas should make sense, Christ came to me in stories. Slowly, I came to understand that his life, words, sacrifice, and resurrection formed the hidden logic behind every novel, movie, or play that touched my deepest mind.

I was reading a story when that logic finally kicked in. I was in my 40s, lying in bed with one of Patrick O’Brian’s great seafaring adventure novels. One of the characters, whom I admired, said a prayer before going to sleep, and I thought to myself, Well, if he can pray, so can I. I laid the book aside and whispered a three-word prayer in gratitude for the contentment I’d found, and for the work and people I loved: “Thank you, God.”

It was a small and even prideful prayer: a self-impressed intellectual’s hesitant experiment with faith. God’s response was an act of extravagant grace.

I woke the next morning and everything had changed. There was a sudden clarity and brightness to familiar faces and objects; they were alive with meaning and with my own delight in them. I called this experience “the joy of my joy,” and it came to me again whenever I prayed. Naturally I began to pray every day. And over time, this joy of my joy became a constant companion: a steady sense of vitality and beauty that endured even in periods of sorrow and pain.

I was living in the beautiful Southern California town of Santa Barbara when I realized that prayer—that God—had transformed my life utterly, giving me a depth and pleasure of experience I had never known. I drove up into the hills one day, and with the forest and the city and the sea rolling by my windows, I asked God, “How can I thank you for what you’ve done for me? What could I possibly offer you in return?”

And as clearly as if he had spoken aloud, God answered, “Now, you should be baptized.”

I was stunned. Nothing could have been further from my mind. I was a man of the coasts and cities, at home among the snarks and cynics of postmodern times. I was a realist who believed in science and reason; a worldling who loved sex, violent movies, politics, and a good single malt scotch. I was—I am—proud of my Jewish heritage. I feared that becoming a Christian would estrange me from my past, my parents, my culture, and from reality itself.

I was not thinking about sin and redemption, not yet. I was not worried about heaven and hell. Having a personal relationship with Jesus was only a faint suggestion of a thought. No, all I wanted was to know the truth about the world, about this god who had done so much for me.

Over the following months, I realized that the voice that had spoken into my heart knew me better than I knew myself. Whatever problems it would cause with my family and friends, whatever difficulties it would bring in my career, I knew I had to be baptized.

My bar mitzvah had been an empty ritual, devoid of God—and truth. But my baptism was the outward expression of a deep and authentic inner conviction.

The moment I rose from my knees by the baptismal font, I knew I had stepped through some invisible barrier between myself and a remarkable new journey. Within a week or so, my wife noticed it too: a new joy and easiness.

My soul had found its northern star. And that star still leads me on.

Andrew Klavan is the author of The Great Good Thing: A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ (Thomas Nelson).