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Hellish High Jinks Begin At Home

Photo by MICHELLE BAKER

You decorate your house, porch and kids - now try dressing up your vodka.

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By GREG and MICHELLE BAKER

Tribune correspondents

Published: October 24, 2008

Updated: 10/26/2008 04:16 pm

Everyone ... SING!

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

With those holiday greetings

And great happy meetings

When friends come to call

It's the most wonderful time of the year!

It's Halloween!

We have always been Halloween nuts. Quite simply put, it is the one day of the year where we can dress up, play pretend, gorge on candy and scare the wits out of each other. It's as juvenile as it gets, and we love it.

It's also a bonding tool for our relationship.

We begin converting our bungalow into a creepy graveyard on Oct. 1. The headstones might not come out, but there we are, in the backyard repairing tombstones, sorting through bats and gorifying the zombies.

We try to begin Operation Graveyard on a cool day, which never happens. It is Florida in October, after all. Inevitably, we will get into an argument over where Zombie A should hang and why Zombie B was stored improperly and now seems to be displaying a rather vulgar hand gesture to the neighborhood.

Michelle will declare Greg incompetent at properly hanging cobwebs and be forced to redo all he has done. Greg will glare at Michelle as she ties pretty purple satin bows in the fake hair of his Motel Hell bloody heads. We will each curse the very thought of hanging bats from fishing line so that they appear to be flying, and we will rue the day orange Halloween lights were ever invented. They're more stroke-inducing than Christmas tree lights, we swear.

But when all the spiders and ghosts have their proper home, we inevitably smile at each other over a job well done. We have also found forgetting and forgiving is easier done over our famous Eyeball-tinis. Who can be angry when there is vodka and eyeballs to be had?

DIRTY EYEBALL-TINI

3 ounces vodka

1 tablespoon dry vermouth

1 tablespoon olive juice

2 radishes

2 pimento-stuffed olives

Fill bar shaker with ice. Pour in vermouth and shake well. Drain vermouth into martini glass from shaker, retaining ice. Pour vodka and olive juice into iced shaker. Shake very well. Strain vodka mix into the martini glass.

With a small paring knife, carefully cut out center in radish for one olive. Use a zester to remove small strips of the radish's red flesh, alternating so that strips of white and red flesh are visible. Insert one pimento-stuffed olive into radish. Repeat. Pop eyeballs into the vodka martini and enjoy.

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