My neighbours across the street are installing cobwebs on their house. They have a large spider web draped over their front yard tree, and an inflatable green spider. They also have three ghosts. These ghosts are recognizable as such because the are draped head to toe in white sheets. I’m not sure where this visual shorthand for ghosts began. I suppose it has to do with the winding sheets used to bury the dead. I do see the theme my neighbour is after: an abandoned and decaying mansion overgrown and crumbling, visited by the spirits of the former residents. It’s sort of like the opposite of ‘staging’ your house for sale—making it look decrepit for Halloween.

            It brings to mind a scene I remember from a movie I saw as a kid: people are sitting around a warm fire in a beautifully draped and furnished living room. Slowly the colour drains out of the room, revealing a grey and desiccated shambles overrun with spiders and vermin. The ‘people’, apparently, were ghosts, and they saw their surroundings as they were in life: warm and comforting. We who ride the moving sidewalk of time see the room for what it is now—abandoned and creepy. 

            My neighbours, it seems, are playing the same game, evoking the slow dissolution caused by time by draping their well kept suburban house in the trappings of death and decay. It sounds weird, until you realize the whole neighbourhood is caught up in this business. My local community is overrun with skeletons, coffins, zombies and sundry ghouls. It’s coming up to Halloween, the marketing season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I can’t blame the retailers for this frenzy of dolorous decor completely though. A festival of this sort has been around for centuries in various cultures, and we seem to like it. Think the Mexican ‘Day of the Dead’. 

            I notice from the local news that some people have taken things too far, swinging hooded corpses from their trees. That’s getting a touch too close to the kind of reality we deal with on the nightly news. It’s good to know that there is a line that mustn’t be crossed, although, as I pass figures emerging from fresh graves in my neighbour’s petunia patch, it’s hard to tell where that line might be.

            The decorations seem to suggest a nightmare. We all have dreams, and some of these are disturbing. There’s not much we can do about this, so we theorize that dreams have value. Perhaps they prepare us to deal with the terrifying realities of daily life. Or perhaps, as Aristotle would have put it, they are a form of catharsis—a purgation of emotions that makes us more civilized.

            Speaking of purgatives, we have our store of Cheesies and Gummies ready for the kids. And this year they will probably be brave enough to approach our doorstep without a mask—except for…well, you know, the costume kind. I kind of liked it when, pre-pandemic, we could present them with a tray of treats and see their green and purple faces up close. I used to stick an old McDonald’s cup-top shaped like Darth Maul in the middle of the tray. I liked the way he looked like he was fighting his way out from under a landslide of chocolate.

            Soon I’ll have to face one of the true horrors of the season—raking up the yellow leaves deposited all over our back yard by our maple tree. Our tree, by the way is a kind of changeling itself. We bought it as an exotic Harlequin Maple with variegated green and white leaves. The poor thing took one feel of the hard Burlington clay soil and gave up on trying to be exotic.  Thereafter it mysteriously turned itself into an everyday green-leafed maple, and we haven’t seen a touch of white on the leaves since. It was quite a trick, like a werewolf morphing into Lon Chaney Jr.  Okay, not so much—but when the leaves turn in the fall, they are a really spectacular yellow against the blue sky. They look pretty darned exotic, actually. Now the yellow carpet is on the ground and the tree is skeletal and dead-looking. Time to put out the plastic pumpkin. Next step? A shroud of snow.