#gothparenting

The Macabre Art of the Goth Lullaby 🦇🍼

Let’s be real for a second. When you see a track titled "Sweet Baby" on an album from a darkwave duo, you might expect that we momentarily lost our minds and wrote a wholesome acoustic jingle.

We absolutely did not.

"Sweet Baby" is indeed a lullaby dedicated to a daughter, but we are The Undead Association. We don't do "wholesome" without a heavy, suffocating dose of the macabre.

Instead of a gentle nightlight, this track feels like the heavy iron door of a crypt slamming shut to lock the monsters out (or perhaps, lock them in with you). It is fiercely protective, but dripping with a dark, foreboding tension. We layered unsettling, creeping synths to create a sense of impending doom for anyone who might dare to disturb the cradle.

It’s less "twinkle, twinkle, little star" and more "sleep peacefully while I command the shadows to swallow your enemies whole."

It is tender, yes—but it is genuinely terrifying if you are on the outside looking in. Add it to your late-night playlists when you need to feel fiercely, dangerously protective.

As we approach the hustle and bustle of the Holiday season it would be a great idea to gather your family around the coffee table (or kitchen table if the coffee table isn’t big enough) and have a little game night!

I love playing games with my family on these dark and chilly nights, especially spooky games, like Call of Cthulhu, Gloom, or even a horror themed D&D session.

Time together with your loved ones is always special but making it fun and spooky makes it even more memorable in my opinion. So while we don’t get to play games very much since busy lives get in the way when we do it’s just magical.

The last time we had a family game was a couple weekends ago and it…was a delightful disaster full of laughs and cussing, so take it from me, learn the game you want to play first before getting your family in on it lol. I am planning another game night with a game I’m a little more familiar with and while it’ll be made a bit easier since Kee is only 10, and really homebrewed, making a slightly spooky D&D game night shouldn’t be too hard.

So in planning this I want to share some ideas and a link to maybe help you the next time you want to plan a family game night.

So since I’m planning it to be a kid friendly D&D one off, I wanted to get Kee his very own dice set (mainly cause I’m superstitious when it comes to my own dice sets) so I bought him a set I know he’ll love that wasn’t too expensive in the chance he really doesn’t like D&D. Aside from the game itself, I am going to make a few little snacks to have while we play and with it being a spooky game I’m thinking of making some themed treats. Checking pinterest for those ideas is always fun for me, since I can find things that maybe aren’t spooky or creepy to start with but can very quickly become a goth-able delicacy with a few adjustments. Like cupcakes can quickly become GUT-cakes, and brownies can very swiftly create grave plots with a little imagination. This board on pinterest I have is where I keep recipe ideas I would like to try or use again and again, and while not everyone in my house is vegan (including myself) I have a fair amount of vegan recipes there since I try to help my tummy not hate me. Other than the game and snacks, creating atmosphere for your game is top of the list to make it memorable, and since it’s D&D that I’m planning on us playing, I have a couple ideas to eventually put into play so my kiddo has the best time, things like getting dressed up, drawing our characters, music, and talking in funny accents.

We may think our little ones don’t care or won’t remember the extra bits we put into family time, but they really do, even with the last game time we had Kee has been asking about doing it again, as he really liked the story telling part of Gloom. The little smile on their faces when you take the extra time to make family time even more special is the real reward at the end of the day.

Hello friends, welcome back to another holiday post! So today we’re talking about traditions, and along with talking about our family traditions I want to mention a few that I really like that are goth learning and fun.

During this time of year families around the world are working at getting ready for the upcoming holiday season, amongst shopping for gifts, decorating your house, planning the big dinner, they’ll find the time to participate in their own family traditions.

In our house we have a big tradition that we’ve been doing since my sister and I were little kids, and that was getting a letter from our Christmas Elves. We didn’t do letters to/from Santa, we got letters from the Elves from his Workshop and I loved that so much that even as a teenager I would still get excited about reading this letter (that I knew my mother was writing) from my Elf. So I took this tradition and started doing it with Kee, and while he’s not super keen on Santa, he adores his Elf. This year we’re kind of mixing it up just a bit and we’re doing our letters as a back and forth kind of thing. I bought a little mailbox from the dollar store and we plan on customising it to better fit our decor and Kee’s style, but essentially we’re going to “send” letters back and forth during December. This is a really cute and fun tradition for the holidays and honestly you can do it all year around with a little modification and imagination.

A tradition I’ll be doing for the first time this year is hanging a spider ornament in my tree, and while I don’t think Kee will honestly care much for the poem that goes along with the tradition of the Christmas Spider, I think by it being there he will ask the questions that will lead to the conversation of why it’s there. I really like the idea behind the Christmas Spider, a family not having much but still getting a tree to at least have something for the season, a spider spinning her web in the tree to make it her home, and Santa seeing this and turning the web into a beautiful addition to the tree to bring the family delight when they wake and allow the spider to still have a home in the tree. I do like it and I think over time Kee will come to cherish the Spider and it’ll be a great addition to our family traditions for the holidays.

When you look at our tree the night before Creepmas, you’re going to find an interesting addition buried in among the branches and other ornaments, the bright green shine of a pickle. The idea behind the Christmas Pickle, is that on Creepmas morning the first to find the pickle will get an extra little something, usually something small or even just a nice piece of candy. The tradition I believe started in Germany, the one to find the pickle said to have a year full of luck, and now days it’s used either as a way to slow down the present opening process by allowing the one to find the pickle to open the first gift, or they get to get an extra present. We do a bit of both but mainly as a way to decide who gets to open the first gift since Kee is an only child.

Another tradition, more legend but I digress is Krampus. In this house we love the legend of Krampus and enjoy reading about him each year. I look forward to Krampusnacht each December, where we make lump of coal cookies and Kay and I try to get through a holiday horror movie. This is a tradition more for Kay and I than for all three of us, since Kee is still a little young to try watching horror movies.

Along with the above, I always watch White Christmas at least once during the season, and Kay and I always watch Nightmare Before Christmas, and since a little small child I’ve always watched How The Grinch Stole Christmas. We make cookies, listen to music and sing along to the carols and for the last two years I’ve been making my own cards and wrapping paper.

(Very late to the game but I thought I would still post this one, read it with the knowledge that this is in past tense)

It’s spooky season y'all!

This year in our neck of the woods it’ll be another pandemic friendly Halloween, which isn’t that much different than our normal Halloween as our kiddo is Autistic, but somethings I want to do to make the day as special as it can be for our little one I’m going to share with you here.

So in our house we don’t do trick or treating due to a number of things but mainly our little darkling is very picky about the treats that are given out and isn’t afraid of handing them back with a polite “No thank you.” (We learned this very early in our adventures of trick or treating).

So let’s get into the fun of what we plan on doing! First up is a Boo-basket, something I saw on pinterest a couple years back and kept forgetting about it, cause honestly how often do we revisit the boards we make on pinterest? Anywho, I have the plan to go this weekend and pick up somethings that I think our kiddo will like, like scented halloween markers, big funny pens and spooky pencils and erasers, stickers, and little notebooks, socks, maybe a set of halloween pajamas (if I can find any in his size), halloween books, and a couple cute little crafty things we can do together, and of course candy that I know he’ll like. Basically you gather all your goodies and arrange them in a basket or halloween bucket and have it waiting the morning off like a fun spooky stocking!

We’ve also planned to have some not so spooky but super fun and cute Halloween movies to watch during the day while we carve our pumpkins and bake seasonal cookies! Movies like Halloweentown, The Addams Family, and Hotel Transylvania to name a few. We’ll also be dressing up, this year is a little blasphemous but still really fun. I'll be going as a creepy nun, my husband as a plague doctor, and our kiddo as a possessed child. Dressing up for Halloween is mainly just for the fun of getting dressed up in our house since we don’t really go out, but our little one still enjoys the heck out of it!

Other ideas we would have loved to have gotten to do this year but sadly time has gotten away from us, and some life things that won’t allow for it to happen this year are: Having an outdoor Halloween carnival type event for our little one and their cousins, with pumpkin ring toss, knock the ghosts, Witches golf, Zombie eyeball races, Halloween egg hunt, and just so many other cute and fun ideas that we could do next year!