So every Halloween for the last two Halloweens, I've been making my spin on a punch recipe I picked up a few years ago. I was throwing a party and I wanted something with a spooky feel to it. I figured, "what could be spookier than a punch that looks like green slime?" So I took to the gutter and start gathering ingredients, but then it occurred to me: "WAIT. What if it just LOOKED spooky but actually tasted GOOD?" So I took to the internet and started taking ideas from different green punch recipes and ended up with my own signature witch's brew.

Ingredients

1 tub of lime sherbet ice cream
1 2-liter bottle of lemon-lime soda
1 gallon of Green Berry Rush Hawaiian Punch

Optional
One big-ass pumpkin
1 bottle of Burnett's Citrus vodka or something similar
Dry ice

First step, leave everything to cool in the fridge except the sherbet. This can sit out and soften for a little bit.

Now, if you've opted to get the big-ass pumpkin, you're gonna start by cutting a big hole in the top (big enough for a ladle and a hand to hit comfortably in there). Next, start clearing out the guts and seeds and setting them aside for some other good stuff. (I'd recommend roasting those seeds; hell, they're even good raw. Dunno about the guts though. Hop on AllRecipes or something for that). Now, this step is clearly cosmetic, so unless you wanna go the extra mile for looks and have a pre-gutted pumpkin to carve up later, you might as well skip this step.

After you've properly gutted your Jack, give the inside a good rinse too. Unless you want some hints of pumpkin juice up in this lemon-lime punch (which I'm not knocking, I just haven't personally tried), you're gonna want to fill and pour this baby out a couple times or until the water mostly retains its clarity rather than that rusty, stagnant color that comes from running pumpkin juice with water. Now you can draw a goofy looking face on this guy—give him some spinny drunk eyes and a stuck-out tongue. Or do whatever you want. It's your drunk-o-lantern.

Proceed to pour the lemon-lime soda and the Hawaiian punch into the pumpkin corpse or cauldron or whatever receptacle you're using. Pour to taste, but as a rule, I typically go 1 part Hawaiian punch to 2 or 3 parts lemon-lime soda. You want more of the fizz of the lemon-lime soda, but you still want the color of the Hawaiian Punch to give you that slimy vibe. Lastly, dollop 1 or 2 healthy scoops of lime sherbet ice cream into the punch. Hopefully, by this point the sherbet will be warmed up enough that it will be soft and a little runny, but not so runny that you're ladeling it rather than dolloping it. From here, give your mixture a gentle stir and let out a witch's cackle or a mad scientist's maniacal laugh for good measure. As the sherbet begins to incorporate, it will set on top of the punch giving it a creamier taste as well as a texture more reminiscent of slime. On top of this, the color gradient that forms from the mix of the greens makes for a more complex looking mixture.

You can simply mix these ingredients together in a blender, but I like how the sherbet begins to set on top of the punch as it melts naturally rather than how it looks when it's beaten together at 80 MPH. Blending may be a better option if you want something that looks more homogeneous, but for a Halloween party, the uglier this looks, the better.

If you're wanting a non-alco punch, then you're done (unless, of course, you want some smoke coming off this beauty, then skip down to the paragraph after this next one where I talk about dry ice)

Next, begin to pour in your citrus vodka. Resume your maniacal laughter and/or fiendish cackles. I chose Burnett's the last time I did this because, 1. I was in college, and 2. With all the other ingredients at play here, the top shelf stuff won't really make much of a difference in this punch. I don't give a precise measurement or part-count for this because it really is up to individual taste and liver strength. I will say that these ingredients play so nicely together that even if you can taste the liquor, you probably won't mind that much. Even still, drinking is so relative that I won't go that way. I will say that if you're unsure and you don't want to spoil your concoction, pour yourself a cup of the virgin punch and then let that be a microcosm of alcohol testing. I usually do this and it does the trick for me.

Lastly, there's one more optional aesthetic touch. If you have access to dry ice, you can simply heave a few small pieces in your punch before party time or you can use a machine to place a little atmospheric smoke over the brew. If you decide to go for the first option, you will have the added cosmetic of bubbling punch, but you would also do well to warn your guests that you've put solid dry ice in the batch. There are better ways of ending a party early than with a friend choking on dry ice.

And that's it! After all your loyal toil and trouble, you've made that drunk-o-lantern bubble! Take it easy on the stuff—it goes down as easily as it does spookily. Just take a lesson from the Horseman: don't lose your head.