Each holiday has its own type of basket: fruit baskets for Christmas, Easter baskets full of plastic eggs and jelly beans, picnic baskets for the 4th of July, cornucopias for Thanksgiving.

 

Traditionally, Halloween’s “basket” has been an old pillowcase stuffed with hard-earned packets of Sweetarts and Bit-o-Honeys. But here’s a newfangled idea for bringing a little horror into the lives of those who are “too old” (i.e., over twelve) to participate in Trick or Treat activities: a special Halloween fright basket, to be delivered by the ghoul of your choice.

 

Head on down to Fright Basket Headquarters: Jay Asia on S. Grand. Don’t skip a single aisle! The shelves are arranged by country, and teem with something for everyone. In the Central European aisle, for instance, mixed in with all the jars of magenta borscht, you’ll find terrifying cans of mystery meat, like the stylishly labeled Blood Sausage, below. (Although made in the USA, it’s popular with St. Louis’s large population of displaced Transylvanians.)

 

 

Skip over to the Latin America shelf for a sight too disgusting for even our newsletter to show you: Pickled Pork Rinds! Imagine bumpy blobs of thickly curled discolored flesh and bile-yellow shreds of something, all mingling repulsively in a grey wash of embalming juice! Yuck!

 

 

Across from this display of liquid fire are the refrigerator cases. Now choose some kind of shaggy brown tuber or carbuncled greenish “fruit.” Who cares about name, taste, or country of origin! We’re going for scare factor here!

 

Back in the seafood section you’ll find all sorts of grotesqueries to enhance your unique gift. The basket I put together for my father-in-law here received a giant lead-colored dried fish with spiky fins, opaque sunken eyes, and a lovely toothy leer.

 

The Chinese shelf has lots of cool seaweed and “fungus among us.” The Indian shelf has jars full of strange relishes. The toiletries shelf has lots of putridly stinky soaps and lotions.