'Tis The Season

Make no mistake: I grew up in a house that did its best to go overboard when it came to decorating for Halloween. Each year, my mother would allow each of her three boys to pick a scary candle from the selection at the local five and dime to add to the display that grew and grew each year on window ledges and other horizontal surfaces around our house. There was also a big box of autumnal colored bric a brac mixed with countless cardboard cutouts of witches, skeletons, and monsters of every stripe. Each October, it became increasingly difficult to find a spot to place and tape it all.
As a parent, I have taken this tradition and passed it along to my own little family. We have our own box of Halloween, and there is a sense of mild relief that having only one kid means that our presentation is limited by a factor of three. It does mean that my wife and I feel free to carve our own Jack-O-Lanterns to place beside the one my son dutifully creates to decorate our porch each year. We have some orange lights that roughly approximate a spider's web that we hang in one window, but our spectacle is generally limited to our front porch.
That's not the case with some of the houses in and around our neighborhood. There is one house in particular that gets my notice. It should be noted that this is a house where you will find the icicle lights for Christmas hanging from the eaves year-round. And at the end of September, their tiny yard begins to fill up with a wild assortment of ghouls and ghastlies. Not simple cardboard cut-outs, but full-sized animatronic contraptions that pull their own heads off or writhe about on the lawn in electronic agony. There are a number of faux stone tombstones, and a skeletal pirate that guards the front walk. This year they have even added an inflatable black cat that towers some eight feet over the rest of the display. The fact that they are only a hundred yards up the street from my elementary school may have something to do with their mild extravagance. They are guaranteed an audience of three hundred and fifty parading youngsters each years when we empty onto the sidewalk for our annual parade around the block.
By the next week, the zombies and headstones have all been put away again, but the icicle lights are still hanging there, waiting for the first week of December to signal the coming of winter.