Grumpy Pumpkin tells me “I’m still suffering from Halloween withdrawal, maybe another pick-me-up would help.” Perhaps I can help.

Sets of witchy-themed striptease photo-shoots appear every Halloween, but take a while before they circulate widely enough for me to find them. This year they have turned up sooner, and there are more of them, than usual. So many more, that I was thinking of doing a mid-week post every week from now until xmas just to post the best of what I found. Grumpy Pumpkin has offered the perfect pretext for at least making a start on this plan.

Ember is described as a “stunning blond coed with … a banging hot body”; she also has, apparently a 32F bust. Ember squeezed said banging hot body and 32F bust into a four-piece witchy outfit and, to the whirr and flash of a digital camera, and for the greater happiness of humankind, took half of it all off again (the singlet and skirt). Sensibly she left the cape and hat on. They are very fetching.

I found two different galleries online of this photoshoot (here and here). There is a certain amount of overlap between them, but there are also some fresh photos here and there online. In all, I found twenty-three different photos: too many to post here—and some are too hot for this site anyway—so I will limit myself to six. Some of the file names suggest there may be over fifty photos of this shoot on Ember Reigns’ own site. So, if you’d like to see more, look here and here, and then either trawl the internet or cough up for the whole set.

I love this little bronze sculpture of a young witch flying on her broom, she seems so happy! She also looks very Art Nouveau-ish, with her swirling fall of hair and her arching back.

I have seen small Nouveau bronzes like this before—of witches too—but they are inevitably signed, more carefully sculptured and finely detailed. I know that the Nouveau-style remained popular for medals and coins right through Art Deco and Modernism, but the later work in this style is usually pretty obvious. It is debased as well as derivative, it is a little less sharply defined and the composition is usually a little clichéd.

Despite my affection for this figurine, I suspect it is not from the Nouveau period (ca. 1895–1910). How much later is a guess, but the patina on the bronze suggests 50s to me. For the record, the bronze is 108mm tall, 104mm wide and 118mm from the tip of the broomstick to the back of the broom bristles; the circular base is 48mm in diameter. The base is hollow-cast and has a short cross-bar bracing the sides. Probably this enabled the bronze to be secured to a now-lost base.

When I first saw this bronze I wondered—given the slightly crude sculpting and aerodynamic shape—whether it might be a hood ornament or car mascot, but the base seems too small and I can’t find any record of a witchy hood ornament. I guess it might be a novelty or commissioned piece, but I am more inclined to think it is a work of art or art object.

Grumpy Pumpkin asked a very good question: “Shouldn’t you be celebrating Halloween in the fall? Your fall that is, which would be my Beltane. Just one of those things that confuses me.”

I can’t believe it didn’t occur to me to mention this in one of my Halloween Countdown posts! Perhaps because I have explained it so many times elsewhere it didn’t occur to me here.

The question is a little tricky, and it would be difficult for Grumpy Pumpkin to even ask it without making it almost impossible to answer.

The Wheel of the Year is reversed between the northern and southern hemispheres. In the northern hemisphere Beltane (the Fire Festival that marks the beginning of summer) occurs on 1 May; in the southern hemisphere it occurs on 1 November. Likewise, in the northern hemisphere Samhain (the harvest festival that marks the beginning of winter) occurs on 1 November; in the southern hemisphere it occurs on 1 May.

Wikipedia says “The Wiccan Samhain doesn’t attempt to reconstruct a historical Celtic festival, but draws inspiration from both extinct and surviving All Hallow’s Eve (Halloween) folk traditions.” This is certainly true in the northern hemisphere, just as “in most forms of Wicca”—again quoting Wikipedia—Xmas “is celebrated at the winter solstice as the rebirth of the Great God.” Ditto Ostara/Vernal Equinox with Easter.

One of the advantages of being a pagan in the southern hemisphere is that there is no temptation to mush together (or confuse) Samhain and Halloween or Yule and Xmas or Ostara and Easter. For me at least, Halloween, Xmas and Easter are secular and public celebrations, Samhain, Yule and the Vernal Equinox are pagan and private celebrations. Of course, I use as much pagan symbolism in my secular celebrations as possible, but that is an aesthetic thing and it is not exactly a challenge to do (Eggs and Easter, not difficult to manage! Christians trying to claim Easter and Christmas have a lot harder time of it.) This also means we get a “real” Xmas and a “real” Yule etc: which is twice the fun.

Most of the symbolism for Halloween, Xmas and Easter are completely “wrong” for Australia anyway, particularly Melbourne. The chance of a “white Xmas” in Australia is the same as the proverbial snowball in hell, so fake snow on your windows in the middle of a heatwave is just stupid. Then there are pine-trees for Xmas, which were favoured I believe because they are evergreens and in the northern hemisphere offer a bit of life and colour in the midst of winter. I reckon that about 99% of pine-trees in Australia are grown in plantations; there are a few native species but you don’t see many away from the coast and in the south.

Forests in Australia look completely different to those in the northern hemisphere. Eucalypts are evergreens, but they have leaves that turn away from the heat of the sun to reduce loss of moisture. The leaves are pale and the trucks are pale too. So you can look through a Eucalyptus forest. All of which means that pine trees look “wrong” (too dark, too solid-looking): when you bring home a pine tree for xmas you are bringing home a tree you will almost never see in the bush, and which looks out of place in the bush. A plastic xmas tree is about as natural.

Regarding Easter: rabbits are a despised noxious pest and one of the many reasons Australians hate the English (hate as in love/hate, we have just as many reasons to love them), because it was an English settler who thought “wouldn’t it be jolly fun, and just like home, if there were rabbits we could hunt in this colony.” Another arsehat introduced foxes. Only the Westminster system (and Cricket) could counter-balance the introduction of rabbits and foxes to Australia! For the best part of a decade we have had chocolate Bilbys at Easter in Australia.

A bilby is a desert-dwelling marsupial that looks a bit like a small rabbit. There are two species, one already extinct, the other endangered. As Wikipedia explains “There have been reasonably successful moves to popularise the bilby as a native alternative to the Easter Bunny by selling chocolate Easter Bilbies (sometimes with a portion of the profits going to bilby protection and research.” Of course, not only are bilbys an endangered species, but there are very poor breeders compared to rabbits. So, not a great fertility symbol!

As for Halloween, well, as I said in my first Halloween in Melbourne post, Halloween is only just getting a foothold here, so all of it is a bit weird and new. But let me mention only one thing: pumpkins. The pumpkin that rules in Australia is the Queensland Blue. You need a big, sharp knife and a decent swing to cut into it, and only the most determined and muscular person—or one with power-tools—could carve one, to say nothing of the fact that one large enough to carve would be too heavy to lift (10–15kg or about 30 pounds). So, all wrong again.

To return to Grumpy Pumpkin’s question—”Shouldn’t you be celebrating Halloween in the fall?—by which s/he probably means “Shouldn’t you be celebrating Halloween at the start of winter.” The answer is “no” because Halloween isn’t our Samhain (or your Beltane) and the rest of the world celebrates it on 31 October. But if Grumpy Pumpkin means “Shouldn’t you be celebrating Samhain at the start of winter, the answer is “yes, we do.” As you can see, the question implies something different depending on which hemisphere you are in!

I hope that is all clear. I will continue to celebrate the Wheel of the Year, but I will also celebrate Easter, Halloween and Xmas because it is fun, along with New Year’s Eve, The Boxing Day Test, and—with greater respect and dignity—ANZAC Day. That is, all our national and secular Holidays because I am an Australian as well as a pagan.

Here is a Hexentanzplatz postcard you can compare to my previous—and heavily populated—HTL version (i.e. Hold To Light).

The postcard is an unsigned woodblock image, whereas most of the others I have seen are lithographed. It is is dated 28 August 1899; it is postmarked on the same day from Thale and on the following day from “Colenfeld” (i.e. Kolenfeld, which belongs to the city of Wunstorf, in the district of Hanover, Germany).

In this card we have six witches and a couple of bats on their way to the Hexentanzplatz [the witches’ dancing place] on Brocken Mountain in Germany. The leader is riding side-saddle on a pig; she is followed by two witches on brooms, one on a pitch-fork, one riding side-saddle on a goat and one who seems to be standing on the hill-side waving to the others.

Our witches are—as usual for this blog, and for German witch-themed postcards generally—either undressed or under-dressed. Perhaps the ostensible reason for this is that our witches had all sneaked out at night and were in their night-clothes. If so, these witches slept in an interesting array of under-things: from full-length dresses (the witch on the pig), through sleeveless-slips (the witches on the brooms), to just a skirt and no top at all (the witch on the goat).

I think this one is my favourite. It is a very cute goat.

As of this morning the 282 posts on Sexy Witch have been viewed 2,480,606 times. My busiest day was Halloween this year with 7,123 visits. I always get a spike in traffic around Halloween, which means that after Halloween there is a catastrophic—almost panic-inducing—fall in traffic. Check out the graph:

So, I’ve been thinking, what do I post in this traffic-vacuum? Something from the top-shelf to lure you (plural) back. Perhaps it would it be a waste to post something that good when hardly anybody is paying any attention. Then again, perhaps I should reward those faithful few who do visit, visitors who are like your closest friends who stay around after the party to help clean up.

Then there is the question of what to post. Are we over Halloween for a while? Also, I’ve kept it all nice and family-friendly for a while. Isn’t it time for something a little more outré? Something that says I am an adult and I am not afraid of a bit of skin. How about Jana D. as a post-Halloween pick-me-up?

For full size images, and the rest of the gallery, go here.

Last night was the most enjoyable and successful Halloween I have had since I started celebrating the event.

As I have said in some of my previous posts, Halloween is only really starting to take off in Australia. In Melbourne, it has to slot into an already busy calendar. It follows the fumble-ball and Rugby League Grand Finals, and it is only a few days before the Melbourne Cup. The Cup is actually the culmination of weeks of Horse Racing—which starts immediately following the finals—known locally as the Spring Racing Carnival.

It is also the time of the HSC and VCE exams. These are the exams that all Year 12 (6th Form) students do before leaving School (as Seniors). Many will go to University, and will get places based on their exam results. Which means that they are really unlikely to go Trick or Treating.

But for younger kids it is all good. And I reckon that they are all just hoping that the adults and older teens would just forget about the football, horses and exams, put up some streamers, stock up on lollies and let them have some fun! And last night they did.

I had four groups come to the door, which will not impress anyone in America, but that is four more than two of the last four years and three more than the other. And all of them were wearing costumes, which was great, because none bothered in previous years. They took a while to get started and I had almost given up on them before the first arrived after 7PM.

“Scream” masks were big this year; there was also a few witches, a Darth Maul (who can’t have been more than six), a Frankenstein and others with “scary” face paint.

The biggest group was about a dozen girls (from about five to twelve) who could be heard squealing and laughing from about four doors away. When they come running up to the door they set off a sound-activated wailing and shaking skeleton I had set up, which sent them into another paroxysm of screaming and laughing. After everyone had grabbed as many boiled lollies, Zachary JuJu Pumpkins, Candy Corn etc etc as they could, the leader launched into a breathless account of all the other places they had visited (which was quite a few!).

The boys seemed to favour smaller groups. One little one with a JOL-bucket full of lollies said—when I asked him how he was going to fit any more lollies in—that he was going to go home and empty the bucket before heading out again. They certainly cleaned me out!

By the time I turned off the lights at 9PM the doorstep and porch were littered with half-a-dozen different types of Zachary treat that had been accidently dropped and trodden underfoot.

Next year I will have to be better prepared. I might make up little bags so the loose lollies don’t get dropped and so I can share them out a little more evenly. And I had better save a monster bag of sweets in reserve in case I run out!

Anyway, I hope everyone had fun last night/has fun tonight.

And I hope you have enjoyed my posts in the last month. It has been exhausting and, at times, difficult, but it has helped me post a stack of material (more than half a year’s worth of posts!) which has cleared a little of my backlog. And it has got me thinking that perhaps I should do some sort of posts more frequently. I’ll think about this when I am not so exhausted!

And remember, Always blow on the pie!

Witches—If all the witches were as pretty as Ellen Drew, the broom-stick industry would have to be rationed, but at any rate the Paramount star is getting ready for Hallowe’en. Miss Drew is currently before the cameras in Paramount’s “The Remarkable Andrew,” in which she is co-starred with Brian Donlevy and William Holden.

Ellen Drew was twenty-six in 1941, when this photo was taken. The snipe’s joke about rationing the “broom-stick industry” is a reminder that this pretty, fun photo was taken in the midst of war. Still, it looks like the rationing began here, since “Miss Drew” is without a broomstick!

Calcutta was filmed in 1945 (see here), but not released until 23 April 1947; the credit line of the press photo is dated “10-5-45″ which apparently means 5 October 1945. (Why the month comes before the day in the US is an utter mystery to me: it is like saying “ten miles, four inches and six feet” or “six ton, two ounces and ten pounds.” In fact it is worse, because not only is the sequence illogical, it is then put in a numerical form that is bound to confuse people, since 10-5-45 means 10 May 1945 in one part of the world and 5 October 1945 in another. “5-Oct-1945″ or “Oct-5-45″ would both avoid confusion but why be sensible about these things when national pride is at stake? Grrr.)

BTW: Imdb does not list Virginia Welles in the Cast list of Calcutta; and there are practically no details in their entry on her here beyond an improbable date of birth “25 June 1925″ ). Likewise, Wikipedia does not have an entry on her, but they do mention that Orson Welles “married actress and socialite Virginia Nicholson” in 1934 (when she was nine according to indb’s date of birth!); she got a divorce early in December 1939, and in the spring of 1940 she married Charles Lederer, at San Simeon; by 1949 Lederer was married to Anne Shirley; what became of Virginia Nicholson/Welles/Lederer is unclear. (A stray Imdb entry for Virginia Nicholson does not add anything; but the Notable Names Database (NNDB) gives a date of birth of ca. 1916.) It amazes me that so beautiful an actress, who married two such famous men, could disappear so convincingly.

[UPDATE 29 Oct 09: Yes, it seems that Virginia Nicholson changed her name to Virginia Welles and that, after her divorce from Welles either continued to go by "Virginia Welles" or "Virginia Nicholson Welles," not Virginia Lederer, even though her first performance listed on Imdb is 1945, after her marriage Lederer. The reason seems fairly obvious, she had a child by Welles; the child carried Welles's name, so she continued to use Welles (rather than Nicholson or Lederer).

As for the possibility that two people have been conflated, it is possible, but both the imdb and the NNDB entries give the place of birth as Wausau, WI which had a population under 20,000 at the time. It seems improbable that there were two actors from this little town, more likely one (or both) of the dates are simply wrong. After all, neither offers a date of death, neither state when she divorced Lederer; in fact, the details are so vague that it really isn't possible to say more than I have.

I urge anyone who disagrees with me, who knows more, or who can be bothered reading a few biographies of Welles or Lederer, to construct a Wikipedia entry for her. We can all make our contributions to that page (it is easier than getting Imdb corrected) and by doing so, we will bring forth the light of knowledge and push back the darkness of ignorance. Or something.]

This postcard was posted 10.30AM 23 October 1912 at Stoughton, MA to Mr & Mrs Chas. W. Welch in “Town”(!?) with this message:

Printed in Saxony and published by Raphael Tuck & Sons, “Art Publishers to their Majesties the King and Queen,” in their ‘Hallowe’en’ Post Card Series No. 183.

And, why yes Oberon, it is another red-headed witch; and yes, she is wearing red! What can I say: I like red!

This “Handembossed Post Card” was printed in Germany but published by H. L. Woehler, New York. It was posted 3PM 12 October 1912 at Natick, MA and sent to Jennie M. Phillips in Lynn, MA.