365 True Things: 197/Lights

I ran out to the market to pick up a sandwich for tomorrow's Ventana Camp outing, since we're hitting the road early (6:30) and I won't want to fix something: all I'll have energy for will be making and drinking some coffee, eating a bowl of cereal.

As I was driving back to the house, I was horrified to see Christmas lights on the next block!

So thoroughly could I not believe my eyes that I had to walk down the street to check it out.

The good news is, they're not Christmas lights, but Halloween lights (though they're mostly red, which isn't very Halloweeny). The bad news is . . . they're Halloween lights! Seriously?

I'm afraid to walk past in the daytime now, lest I'll see some of those ridiculous dancing headstones and blow-up black cats and rattling skeletons. Or an ancient old man with a raven on his shoulder croaking, "Nevermore." (I saw one of those in action the other week at the hardware store. Terrifying—in an existential sort of way.)

This one I actually admire: carving all those pumpkins! Wow.

Call me a Scrooge—or whatever the Halloween equivalent is—but for me, the fun of Halloween is dressing up, going trick-or-treating, and . . . being a kid. Carving a pumpkin or two, sure, and maybe throwing some fake cobwebs around. But all this stuff you buy? It just rubs me the wrong way.

That said, I do appreciate the efforts a couple of my (grown-up) friends go to to come up with smart, creative, elaborate costumes: Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog (before the split-up); Frankenstein and his bride; the Wicked Witch of the West and a witch doctor. They win prizes, deservedly.

Even the White House decorates
for Halloween

But me, I don't get into Halloween. I guess I'm just a curmudgeon. Fortunately, we live in a street that gets pretty much zero trick-or-treating traffic, so I don't have to suffer come Halloween night. I do suffer from the rampant commercialism, which every year seems to get worse and worse: the loooooong build-up to, yes, Christmas.

Which comes earlier and earlier. There's already Christmas stuff in some stores. That does make me feel like a Scrooge. Why can't people wait? When I was a kid, we got our tree and decorated a couple of weeks before Christmas. And that's pretty much what we do now—if we bother to have a tree and decorate at all. (At the bare minimum, we hang lights in the windows.)

I do like playing Christmas music in the Christmas season, though. I will say that.

I'm sure I'll do plenty of complaining as December approaches, so I'll just leave this at that. And mention that I'm very glad I don't live across the street from the newly decorated house.