Shelley Howells: The trick is picking the right sites for a treat

Halloween is not until this time next week, yet already the nagging has begun. We must produce a knockout costume for the little horror to wear to the nightmare of sight and sound that is the Halloween school disco (when did eight-year-olds start going to discos anyway? That's frightening).

While I'm aiming for low-budget, low effort, he's hoping for spectacular, so we hit the net in search of a compromise.

First stop is a favourite US family site, Family Education that lists some wonderfully quirky costume ideas like American tourist (plaid shorts, Hawaiian shirt, cap, maps and camera), a bunch of grapes (attach purple balloons all over child), a Sim from the game the Sims (mainly involves talking with strange words, like Resfee, Who la? Vishu! Oog ma ta la?, every so often) and Static Cling, in which you pin odd socks, hankies and other lost laundry all over yourself.

They even have ideas for kids in wheelchairs, like Tweety Bird in a nest. Natch, none of those are gruesome enough, so we settled on Road Kill, which means dressing in black, painting white stripes down his front, and attaching a blood-smeared soft toy. Sorted.

Next we trawl for some e-cards to send to some (sick) American friends for whom October 31 is bigger than December 25. Halloween.com, is hard to go past. Not because of the cards (simply a link to the way-too-tasteful selection of icards at the Macintosh website,) but because of the eclectic heapings of information, from the humorous to the truly weird. Fascinating, especially the cemeteries links.

For good, basic reliable background info without bells and whistles, How Stuff Works does the trick as usual, though as the fame of the site that explains everything spreads and it gets bigger and more commercial, it is becoming more difficult to navigate.

Not even the net can explain why we bother with Halloween here, but if the huge display of costumes at The Warehouse is anything to go by, it's getting bigger by the year, even though it's just plain daft running around trying to be scary in broad daylight.

Apart from the sugar-high, the most fun to be had at Halloween is the whole pumpkin-carving routine, that perilous task that so often provides all-too-real horror in the form of blood-dripping wounds. While I've carved some beauts in my time, there's no matching the Pumpkin Lady, who creates mind-boggling custom jack-o-lantern carvings, including portraits of presidents and celebrities. The Larry King portrait pumpkin frightened the hell out of me.

For the less ambitious, there are step-by-step carving instructions (and tips on pumpkin juggling) at Pumpkin Carving 101, while Jack-o-Lantern provides year-round fun with watermelon carving techniques.

And if all that's too messy, simply carve a virtual pumpkin.

There's lots of earnest trick-or-treating safety advice at sites like Golden Rules of Halloween Safety. If all those dire warnings get a bit too much (though personally, I can never be told too often to not run in fancy dress), chill out at the Urban Legends Reference pages to get an idea of where those stories of poisoned lollies come from.

Vampire Church is not a site about vampires as much as by and for vampires. They're not kidding and they are not all blood-suckers: "Vampirism is about the inherent ability to acquire unique needed energy resources," the deadly earnest site explains. Apparently, only some vampires draw their strength from blood. Other fuel sources include sex, emotional empathy, storms ... if they listed Snickers bars, I'd be in.

Instead, this Halloween, I'll be out - at the school disco with dozens of costumed, sticky-pawed shriekers (the parents). But there's comfort in knowing there are folk online who sincerely believe they are vampires. Suddenly, the prospect of an evening in a zombie cheerleader costume, with a horde of sugar-crazed children, seems quite sane.

* Email Shelley Howells