I've had just about enough of the modern American version of Halloween.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for dressing up in silly, scary or clever costumes and collecting bucket-loads of candy from the neighbors. Hey - I might even try to do this today. I'm pretty sure I still have my gold tooth from last year when I was Forty Cent, an up and coming rapper who was possibly related to another famous rapper who used to live in my town.
It's the Halloween "decor" I have been seeing with increasingly frequency that I find perplexing and disturbing.
Call me old-fashioned, but I see nothing silly, scary or clever about bloody-looking human body parts, headless bodies in guillotines, and cemetery headstones that read: Your Name Here.
Is hanging a limp human dummy from a noose attached to a tree simply a fun way to show your Halloween spirit?
Must we blow the electric grid for the entirety of New England because we feel compelled to blanket our house and yard with hundreds of blinking, mini pumpkin lights?
And don't even get me started on the inflatables.
What ever happened to a couple baskets of colorful mums and a pumpkin or two? What's wrong with Indian corn, a bale of hay and a scarecrow?
Is it just me here, ranting like a gangrenous zombie with oozing green stuff coming out of my eyeballs?
Should I "join 'em" and run out to the Halloween store and drop $250 on a voice-activated coffin with a decaying corpse inside?
Where's my gold tooth? I think I'm gonna need it.
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12 comments:
I prefer the more natural decorations - the pumpkins, gourds, hay and leaves. They can be put up earlier and left up after. Although right around Halloween (like a few days before and then down the day after) I like seeing the scary things. They definitely don't need to be up now.
I hate the inflatables. Especially when people feel the need to cram 4 or 5 on their yard come Christmastime.
My neighbors have tricked out their house with every conceivable Halloween decoration and they did it THREE WEEKS AGO. I've been staring at plastic headstones, skeletons and an inflatable snowglobe with ghosts for the past three weeks and there's still three and a half weeks left until Halloween.
Someone bury me in one of those plastic coffins right now.
I feel your pain, Mrs. Chicky.
Oh, I'm soooo with you. It's grotesque.
Give me a pumpkin, a mum and a bale of hay anyday.
I agree, I agree, I agree. I love Halloween, but there is such a thing as TOO much. I go with "Fall" decorations, rather than Halloween decorations I have to take down and replace with Thanksgiving ones. Less work for me, which is great, but also b/c the fall-type stuff is just nice and pretty and natural, and not dripping in blood and gore.
It's all a product of the more-is-more theory that also saw the unbelievable explosion in ultra-tacky Christmas decorations 5 or 10 years ago. Go big or go home, y'know? I can't stand any of it.
Please, please, please don't join them!
Those blow-up things really bug me too. I L-O-V-E halloween, but it can be WAY over the top.
I'm all about excessive grostequerie. To give you a better idea where I'm coming from, let me say that I love Rob Zombie movies. Hay bales and erect piles of straw wearing plaid shirts just don't do it for me.
I prefer the hay, cornstalks, mums, plenty of pumpkins, etc. because it does take us right into Thanksgiving.
But what Jane and I used to do on Halloween (when she was in college and way over trick or treating)was sit very still on our front porch, dressed like witches, and scare the kiddies (the bigger ones, of course, who liked this Halloween stuff). My husband also loved the scary sound effect cds.
That was far more fun for us than the blood and guts plastic and blow-up stuff...
But hey, Halloween has become just as commercialized as all other special days and holidays.
Sharon - Pinks & Blues Girls
I'm with Binky. I don't decorate that way myself because I know it would scare Hialey but I love driving by and seeing it in someone elses yard.
It probably says something really awful about me.
I definitely view it from the point of view of a parent of "easily over-excited children." Anything that might give an excuse for nightmares is not among my favorite decorations!
I may feel differently once my kids are older, but it's just too darn scary for them. We trick or treat up and down the main street of the nearby city from 3 - 5 pm and are home before dark... because I need my sleep!
I'm with you.
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