Haul out the Halloween haunting

Over the course of a hundred years, I’ve accumulated quite a collection of Halloween crapola. It started innocent enough with glass blown pumpkins, but through the years pumpkin people, witches, black crows, spiders and skeletons have snuck into the repertoire of things to decorate the house. It’s now at a sentimental rivalry with the Christmas storage and definitely overcoming the attic war of boxes and bags.

I’m just a gal who can’t say no and I’ve rode that tide with the rest of America that hunts in August for the latest scary contraption. At my age I should be scaling down- not revving up! But I owned an event company, and have restaurants and needy friends that knew I’d cave and share my stuff. Thus, justifying every new ghoul coming down the pike. I’m going to have to acquire a pyramid for my cemetery plot.

I can’t help it! I’m definitely a candidate for the shrink’s couch but the joy of adding a plastic trophy for best costume doesn’t help my purging.

Living on a historic street that was famous for thousands of trick or treaters didn’t help either - and we didn’t even live near the epicenter of the houses that were celebrated for their clever decorations. Each house transformed into a ghoul’s paradise which focused on enormous spiders covering a mansion here, or skeletons swarming all over the property of another there, and monsters and zombies afoot everywhere. I could never compete with that!

But talking a dozen of my pals into wearing a gaggle of swan outfits and head down to Salem, MA for the Mecca of Halloween was easy!

We’ve been Beverly Hill tooth fairies, a flurry of Brides of Frankensteins with Frankenstein hubbies. A murder of black crows in a crowd was a sure win and a troop of the ugliest mermaids (including pregnant ones) sipping on blue martinis wasn’t too shabby.

We’ve been a covenant of witches, a banquet room with walking tables and our heads as flowered bouquets complete with plastic silverware – a trophy winner albeit difficult to sip wine while posing – a pack of ghosts and roaring twenties gals and tramps and scarecrows,you never know when a call goes out early for sugar plump fairies.

One year BBB won for a decorated walking talking Christmas tree- another time for The Statue of Liberty. It’s the only time he’ll let me perform magic on him. I sense he’s done with Halloween
My promise to calm down my 20 plus boxes and the age of our own bones has hit an impasse. It’s become a dangerous sport lugging stuff up and down. I agreed to a moratorium on outside decorations. It came close to arse over tea kettle and the exasperation level was loud and clear.

This year he’s going as the invisible man…