Boo

I... don’t like scary things.


I don’t like scary movies, I don’t like scary stories, I don’t like scary buildings/houses/corn mazes, and I don’t like scary costumes. Some people enjoy the feeling of being scared, but I am not one of them. I can’t even sit through most fifteen second movie trailers this time of year. I think I’ve probably passed this disinclination for scary things to my daughter, since she can’t even take suspenseful music; she fussed and ran away from the intro to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, she couldn’t enjoy the subtitles since she can’t read yet, so part of her distress probably came from the fact that we were all laughing while the scary music was playing and she couldn’t understand why.


One thing I have never understood is the need certain people have to make sure the front of their house and their lawn is strewn with festive things whenever a holiday approaches. Christmas I understand, the lights are pretty and are not terribly invasive to the eye of the passerby (that is, if they are applied tastefully and not completely over done). And I’ll applaud Fourth of July decorations, since it’s wonderful to display the love you have for your country (again, within reason, giant balloons featuring Lady Liberty and Uncle Sam are a bit much). But I don’t like decorations for Halloween. The reason for this is not just because I’m not a fan of scary things, but because it seems like it’s impossible for anyone who decorates for Halloween to make it tasteful. So instead, they go completely overboard, buying the entire Halloween aisle at the Family Dollar and depositing it on their lawn.


Ghosts made of masks and ripped up fabric just look ridiculous during the day. And it seems like any place you drive by that has one ripped up fabric ghost absolutely must have sixteen ripped up fabric ghosts. Plastic orange jack-o-lanterns are cute, I guess, but not when you have eight million of them. And what exactly is achieved by placing fake grave stones in your yard? There isn’t anyone buried there, and if there is, it was either so long ago that you don’t know about it and therefore deserves more than something you bought at the Dollar Store, or so recently that you probably wouldn’t like to draw anyone (especially the police)’s attention to it. Fake cobwebs?! When you work very hard to keep real cobwebs off of your house, the motivation behind fake ones does not exist for me, because not only do you have to pull them down, you have to put them up in the first place.


Once when I was very young (probably in kindergarten or first grade), I was out Trick or Treating with a friend. It was cold, so even though we were only a few blocks from my house, we were in the car with her mom, dressed as a princess and a bride. She stopped in front of a place with a couple of scarecrows on the front porch, the ones that are usually stuffed with leaves and dressed in old clothes. These had monster masks propped on them for heads, but since we knew they were just scarecrows, we approached boldly, hoping for candy. We trooped up the steps and stood next to them as we knocked on the door. Before anyone answered, though, one of the scarecrows moved, and grunted. We screamed bloody murder all the way back to the car. I can’t remember how Kristy’s mom convinced us to attempt to gain the door again, but it may have had something to do with the empty porch. Someone answered when we knocked a second time, and told us how cute we were as she handed us candy. To this day I can’t remember the woman or what candy she was awarding us with, but I can see vividly in my mind’s eye the guy who loomed around the side of the door and made the same grunting noise that had terrified me minutes earlier. I hope they enjoyed their joke, because I didn’t.


I don’t like scary things. Movies, costumes, decorations... There isn’t much in the list of silly things that people do on and around Halloween that I would say “hooray” to.


Mostly, I’d just say “boo.”