Every year, when we pull all the Halloween décor out of the
basement by its roots and drop it down from the attic with a crash, I fall
limply into the piles of plastic jack-o-lanterns and ceramic witches and paper
bats and molder, overwhelmed by the task of conjuring the ideal-within-millimeters
environment to surround us for the season. I’ve told you about this before. This
year? No malaise about decorating. We knew exactly where everything should go
and knew exactly what we needed to purchase to bolster our bedecking.
And I think we can thank Big Face.
He’s so big, there was only one corner of the living room that
could take him. And we knew we’d have to decorate around him like a centerpiece
(because even in a corner, he dominated the room). And he’s such a definite theme
that it was easy to choose the appropriate pieces to set around him—pumpkins. That
meant what was mostly left from our stockpile of décor was Styrofoam tombstones,
so those went to the fireplace. Our living room now has two zones: Pumpkin
patch and mausoleum.
And that told us exactly what we needed to buy, as opposed
to wandering the seasonal aisles knowing that every single Halloween decoration
is beautiful but confused as a result about what we should actually buy. We
needed more tombstones. And we needed hay bales. And we needed crows. They
would go in both zones. That easy.
Outside, we weren’t going to do anything too different from
last year. Until I realized that we still had the plastic clips on the gutters
from when we strung icicle lights last Christmas (the first time we’ve ever done
that). So that made that decision easy. We bought orange and purple lights to
outline our house with. Of course, when I got to the top of the ladder, all the
gutter clips were brittle from a year of new England weather, so I had to
replace those since I couldn’t go back on the idea as I had already purchased
lights and had gone through the trouble of bringing out the ladder.
Oh, and then all the Halloween stuff we didn’t use (which is
mostly those gawdawful bone animals…I mean, I kind of liked them when they
first started coming out, but there’s way too many of them in the world now and
they’re starting to look cheesy to me), all that went down into the basement to
decorate the TV antechamber outside my study. Kind of like an island of misfit
decorations. And it might have rekindled my love of bone animals again, I’m not
sure.
And now I don’t know whether to watch spooky movies upstairs
or downstairs or just lay on the lawn outside and look up at the ghoul.
Samhain-damn, I love this season.
