Costumes are only the half of it. Now that we have a house, and a house with a big front porch, decorating it for Halloween is something I look forward to all year.You know how Martha Stewart is like fixated on Halloween, apparently unaware of the irony that everyone thinks she's a witch already? You know what it is? It's the color scheme and the iconography: orange, black, devils, cats, spiders, bats... compare to red & green and angels and Santa? Halloween kicks Christmas's ass.
So yeah we put up some lights in December, but in October... we do it all. Jack o'lanterns, and rubber bats hung from the trees, and that weird stretchy spiderweb stuff... and one of these years I'm going to buy a smoke machine!
I made big scary curtains to hang in the windows (that's my Black Widow, uh, Tick - it was meant to be a spider but I forgot the thorax), and one year I did black bats on a mirror...
I think that came out really nice but unfortunately the bats weren't re-usable. My best idea ever was the Amityville-ization of the front door.
I cut some transparencies to the size of the mullions in the window and hot-glued a bunch of fake flies to them. We tape these pieces into the windows every year and take them down later, often by Christmas. The drips at the top, meant to be, I don't know, black ooze of some kind, I cut out of black contact paper. Not everybody notices the flies, but if they do, they are fairly disturbed.
I have to limit myself to buying one new Halloween decoration every year. This year I got a dozen glow-in-the-dark skeletons to hang on the dead dogwood tree out front. That should have been it, but we went to Target this weekend. Ohhhh, Target's Halloween stuff this year has a Day-of-the-Dead graphic theme, and I went nuts. They have papel picado garlands, and felt banners, and this great skull vase thing.
To make matters worse, Bob fell in love with a whole entire lamp. We justified buying it by saying that we would use it year-round.
Don't worry, we will.
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