Boo!
For my friend Diane, there is no greater holiday than Hallowe’en. To her it’s better than Christmas and birthdays combined. That said, I’m sure it’d come as no surprise that every year we celebrate it as extravagantly as we can manage to do. This year was no exception.
The house was decorated with the requisite decorations of strobe lights, spiders, cobwebs, and other assorted goodies. Diane had even arranged a “bike accident” by placing a bike on the hood of her car, with a dummy under the front wheels. The front yard was covered in piles of fallen leaves, lit candles, and other lighting; and a chair was placed next to a half-dead half-clown thing near the sidewalk. On this chair I sat, warty old witch mask on, and sitting quite askew as if I were dead or not real. Diane was somewhere behind me wearing a killer clown costume, Greg - wearing a Jason from Hallowe’en outfit - was standing obscured by the tree in the front yard, Stephen, in similar dress to Greg’s, stood on the other side of the yard from him, and because Diane’s husband was the last to come home, he got stuck doing candy duty.
Any screaming done on that street tonight, was done in front of Diane’s house. Why? Because it’s very easy to pretend not to be real, and jump or move at people at precisely the right time in order to maximise the effect. That’s particularly easy after people come right up to you, ask you if you’re real, even poke you, and you still don’t move - then you scream, jerk your arms at them, or otherwise offer scaring inducements.
It’s very satisfying to watch supposedly brave ten year old boys scream and run. It’s also amusing to watch people stand at the end of the walk, stare, then run. It’s even more fun to scare adults.
For next year we’ve already got the hanging corpses, floating ghosts, and fountains of blood, all worked out.
Footnotes: The problem with most people, is that they’ve forgotten the reason this particular holiday exists. The dead walk the earth - and we give them treats so they’ll leave us alone. The roles reversed tonight, for us, and we became the walking spirits giving treats to our spectators. It gets better every time.
After we’d packed it in for the night, Greg changed from that costume to his other costume, as he was going out to a club. His costume consists of a number of stuffed baby chickens attached all over his clothes. What is he going as, you ask? Why, a chick magnet of course.
