Season's Greetings

 I want to say something about Halloween decorations.

The first thing you need to know is that this is coming from someone who traditionally overdoes his own festival of lights. 

At Christmas. Each year, the day after Thanksgiving I haul out the big plastic tub with strings of lights and spend a few hours covering the front yard with my devotion to Pacific Gas and Electric. My hope is that my house will be visible from the International Space Station. 

That's Christmas. 

A month before that, you might find some pictures in the windows, and carved pumpkins on the porch. But the emphasis on Halloween decoration has always been on the inside of the house. As  kid, my mother would drag out the assemblage of ghosts and Jack-O-Lanterns and witches we stored in the basement and these became our reminders of that spooky time of year. The paper decorations were taped to the front door and the rest were candles that were created to convey the haunting that was taking place around us. These were displayed primarily on the window sill in the living room. 

And we were never allowed to light these candles. We needed to preserve them for next year. Each year we would go to the local Ben Franklin to buy a new one. Each of us got one. Three more for the pile. 

Not once did we consider buying orange twinkle lights to festoon the front porch. No inflatable spiders. No twelve foot tall inferno pumpkin animatronic skeleton. Another candle for the windowsill. 

Maybe this had something to do with the fact that the first snow of the season would inevitably roll in on or just before October 31. Living in a climate that supported seasons probably had everything to do with the indoor nature of our Halloween display. 

Especially that mess being marketed as "spider webs." My mother was a quilter. I know from cotton batting. Heaving wads of cotton batting around your yard only makes it look like the local sewing circle ended in a bit of a huff, not like a haunted house. When I roll past houses on my way to work, I can't help but thinking their yard would have made a nice quilt. 

The scariest houses were the ones with just a porch light on. If you were willing to go up on that porch for a fun-size Snickers, you earned it.