"Nature is a Haunted House -- but Art --
a House that tries to be haunted."
-- Emily Dickinson
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| Bird house with Lego Wicked Witch of the East legs 10-30-14 |
"Proof of our society's decline
is that Halloween has become
a broad daylight event for many."
-- Robert Kirby
I don't decorate for holidays.
Well, barely. I'm not a total Grinch.
At Christmas, I let the guys decorate a tree and hang up the stockings, but I don't help.
For Halloween, we carve pumpkins, but that's it.
Otherwise, nada. Nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch.
I just don't enjoy decorating my home. I hate the fuss. I hate the clutter. I hate having all that extra shit competing for space. It makes me feel closed in and claustrophobic and anxious in my own house.
Holiday decorating seriously fengs with my shui.
I do enjoy other people's holiday decorations, however. Especially the Halloween kind.
The more elaborate, imaginative, scarier, gorier, spookier, creepier, funnier, cleverer and sillier, the better-er.
Around here, gravestones, skeletons, cobwebs and giant inflatable M&M vampires are becoming as ubiquitous as Christmas lights and Nativity sets.
It always gets me how a house known for its tastefully elegant Christmas displays will, come October, have a full-on grave yard scene on the front lawn, with severed heads and tombstones and empty coffins and bony corpse hands clawing up through the mulch, complete with screams and other haunted house sound effects.
Anyhoo.
Halloween is tomorrow.
I will be in costume.
My home, however, will not.
