Decorating For Halloween Can Be Downright Scary

A friend recently posted on her Facebook wall that it was time to get out the fall decorations. Fall decorations? I thought, I’m supposed to decorate for fall? I’ve always relied on the red maple in my front yard to do my fall decorating. Then I thought she must be talking about that other fall decorating, the one I loathe. Halloween.

I’m not really sure why I feel like this crept up on me. There have been costumes, plastic pumpkins, severed-hand bowls and orange and black twinkle lights on display at Target for weeks now. I even saw Halloween costumes at Whole Foods the other day. Whole Foods, for crying out loud. I didn’t look too closely, but really, who needs an organic bamboo free-trade fireman costume?

It’s not that we don’t have Halloween decorations. We do. They are pretty lame, though, compared to some of the décor I’ve seen in our ‘hood. We have some plastic spiders, a flashing skull that has somehow lost the door to its battery compartment and three plastic light-up pumpkins in neon bright colors. 

I have a love-hate relationship with the pumpkins. Every year, I think I should be using natural pumpkins. They must be better for the environment, I reason. Then I think about all the fertilizer, gasoline and pesticides that go into growing the pumpkins and the plastic ones start looking good. But the plastic ones are made from petrochemicals and the natural ones can be composted. Of course, the plastic ones will last forever and my thinking goes back and forth like this until my daughter starts complaining that we live in the only house without Halloween decorations. This is a gross exaggeration but she’s 9; gross exaggeration goes with her territory. I put the light-up pumpkins on the porch, plug them in and she leaves me alone.

Last year, my daughter had it with my Halloween procrastination. She asked if she could do the decorating. I said “Sure,” because I’ll do anything to avoid as much Halloween as possible. She and her best friend found some black and purple streamers hiding in the bottom of the Halloween decorations bin. They grabbed a roll of duct tape and went to work. Just about a half-hour later, they called me out to the front to see their handiwork. Black and purple streamers festooned the garage door, hanging in random swags from copious applications of matte grey tape. It was gruesome and, to my mind, completely appropriate for a holiday celebrating the horrific.

I figure I have about two weeks before I cave in to my daughter’s insistence that we deck for the Hallows. When we’re done, I’m sure the result will be spectacular. At the very least, our home will be a spectacle.