How Cute Is This?

A fairy door DIY project on Design*Sponge.

Hey-Hey for Halloween!!!

Because Halloween is clearly the awesomest holiday of the year, I thought I'd take a moment to celebrate its unparalleled awesomeness in a space devoted to celebrating such things.

Witness the power of Halloween. Above is a picture of my nieces. Two well-behaved, sweet and adorable children on most days of the year, all it took was a package full of random Halloween goodies from their Aunt Sunny to turn them into maniacally grinning little witches impishly intent on testing the limits of their tolerance of sugar and food coloring.

Evidently, Halloween evolved from pagan Celtic roots into an event with deep religious significance, but since I just bored myself senseless trying to bone up on my Halloween history, I will not relay that history here. Because what makes Halloween so awesome is that Halloween is so damned much fun.

And it's not just because Halloween serves as an excuse for children and adults alike to ingest staggering quantities of "fun-sized" candy bars. Or because kids in costumes--even the greedy, demanding ones--are so amazingly cute. Or because it's a night when a certain kind of woman feels inspired to dress as a slutty version of a public servant and a certain kind of man always, ALWAYS dresses in drag.

It's because on Halloween, we open ourselves up to the possibility that there might be more to our world, and to ourselves, than meets the eye. As the only carnivalesque event that the U.S. celebrates on a nationwide scale, it also serves a crucial social function--by encouraging excess and turning things topsy-turvy, it facilitates a necessary release of potentially destructive or disruptive energies and restores things to their proper equilibrium. (Humans need these kinds of social rituals in order to keep things running smoothly and used to have them frequently. Many of the holidays we celebrate in the U.S. could be fairly understood as the neutered remnants of these events.)

Plus, it's one of the few opportunities we have to collectively celebrate the unbridled power of the human imagination in a country where imagination is undervalued except to the extent it can be exploited--and where the occult imagination is demonized when it isn't ignored. On Halloween, we let ourselves believe, however briefly, that whatever we can imagine, we can somehow manifest. Limits are transcended. Minds are opened.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how newness enters the world.

So hey-hey for Halloween, when all the witches can be seen! Some are black and some are green!

And they are all awesome.

Greetings and Salutations!

"Your language too has soft and beautiful words, but they are not always appreciated. What could be more musical than your word cellar-door?" (William Dean Howells, "Editor's Easy Chair," Harper's Magazine [March 1905]).

Welcome to Nevermore/Cellar Door, a spot for celebrating the beautiful and unexpected in the everyday or overlooked.

Why Nevermore/Cellar Door?

Because a cellar door is something that, semantically, could easily be dismissed as prosaic. And yet cellar doors are quasi-extinct in modern urban environments. How can something that's disappearing still be considered quotidian? Answer: it can't.

"Cellar door" has also been presented as arguably the most beautiful combination of sounds in the English language, in terms of phonaesthetics. And cellar doors--along with wardrobe doors and phone box doors--can also serve as portals into other worlds. In stories about other worlds. And portals.

Like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Or Wizard of Oz (in the movie, Dorothy doesn't quite make it in, but doesn't it hit her on the head and spark the whole adventure?). Or the wonderful Donnie Darko.

And nevermore is both a dismissal and, somehow, an invitation.

Supposedly Edgar Allan Poe chose "nevermore" as the Raven's refrain because "cellar door" was his favorite phrase and "nevermore" was the closest thematically appropriate sonic equivalent he could think of . This explanation may well be apocryphal, but I choose to believe it.

So that's the story. The theme. The premise. Beautiful things that are often overlooked. Wondrous things that we've grown accustomed to.

Or anything in this world of ours that deserves celebrating.