On my commute to work there’s a huge, Victorian stagecoach smack in the middle of someone’s lawn.  A dead person appears to sleep inside of it, his skeletal hands dangling out the window. At night it glows with blue lights.  A few blocks down there’s a shambling haunted house made out of cardboard and splattered with fake blood.  Many other houses have sickly orange lights strung across them, as though they were Christmas lights that came down with malaria.

This has to stop.  Christmas decorations have become increasingly more elaborate over the years--large chemistry sets recreating the eucharist ("blood goes here, wine exits here") and whatnot--but is it really necessary that Halloween follow suit?

These displays aren’t scary; they’re garish. And Halloween needs to be about the scary. It needs to be a quiet, creepy pulse tapping in your veins--not elaborate sets and lightshows.

What I find particularly disturbing is that their creators are the same people who get crazy in December as well.  So they spend tons of time on the Halloween decorations, pull them down, and then spend tons of time on the Christmas decorations.  I would like to visit these people door to door and suggest a variety of hobbies for them, including scrapbooking.  Perhaps they could volunteer at a soup kitchen.  Perhaps they could travel to interesting and exotic parts of the globe, and perhaps not come back.

I live in a condo, but if I owned a house, I would not go to these extremes. I would hang up a few choice decorations designed to elicit sharp feelings of terror--such as paper mache skeletons, the last few Supreme Court opinions authored by Antonin Scalia, and some of my recent attempts at cooking. That’s it. No need to drop three hundred at Home Depot.

Aside from Christmas, I can only think of two holidays that truly deserve this kind of in-depth decoration and design. The first is Arbor Day, because really, who doesn’t want more trees?  The second is Valentine’s Day.  I would greatly enjoy a world where suburban families tried to outdo each other in terms of increasingly romantic, and then erotic, lawn displays: “Honey, you’ll simply have to do better next year. The ‘Honeymoon Night’ scene was impressive last year, but the Parkers have just built recreations of the first seven chapters of the Kama Sutra. I won’t be able to face Phyllis at the PTA meeting if we can’t up our game.”