After a perfect crisp, cool September day where every other store we drove past featured its 2010 Halloween decorations and wares, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I broke out the Halloween Music Collection for The Season.

This is no small thing. I’ve been making Halloween mix-CDs since 1999 and, with the advent of MP3s and websites dedicated to the Halloween Ephemera of Yesteryear, any given year could produce a huge amount of music and up to 5 mixes for that given season. Eleven years hence, and it’s safe to say I have a ginormous collection of Halloween-themed and Halloween-related music, sound effects, audio-dramas, stories and related recordings.

And whoa, I’m small potatoes. Jonathon over at Rotting Flesh Radio claims a Terabyte of pure Halloween Goodness, and I believe him. That’s a LOT of Halloween music.

BUT! Because of the way I was raised, I won’t listen to any of it outside of September/October. I usually wait until later in September, but the day was just SO PERFECTLY SEPTEMBER-Y, and the Halloween stuff was JUST SO HALLOWEEN-Y, that I couldn’t stand it. So I’m rocking out to 11 years’ worth of Halloween awesomeness. This year I have the added benefit of FINALLY understanding the importance of properly labeling and tagging ones MP3s, so besides listening to any given year’s mix, I can set the music player to play Genre HALLOWEEN on random, and I’m good to go for the next… oh, say, 200 hours.

I’ll post highlights here periodically, if I can. This is my busy season, after all, but I refuse to miss the season I love because I’m so busy during the season I love. Y’know?