Fall Follies

So our September summer now appears to be emphatically over, so it’s time for me to put away those t-shirts and bring out my vast array of black, grey, and charcoal sweaters. Yes, I did make a distinction between grey and charcoal.

I’m not a huge fan of fall, perhaps because it begins and ends very suddenly here and then all we are left with is a long, long winter. If I lived in a more temperate climate, perhaps I would feel differently. One thing I do like about fall – other than pretty leaves and back-to-school – is preparing for holidays like Thanksgiving and Halloween, and that is in spite of the fact that I have a horror of Thanksgiving dinners. I have never liked meals that involve turkeys, or any meat that is so graphically displayed. Shudder. I realize that I’m in the vast minority with these feelings, mind you, so I really do understand if Thanksgiving is the highlight of your year – it’s just not my personal cup of tea.

Anyway, there really aren’t any good decorating holidays in the summer, so it’s kind of fun to break out the cool decorations for Thanksgiving and Halloween. My kids are now at the age where they are pretty excited to see severed arms, chainsaws, and whatnot in Wal-Mart, so I’m sure we will at some point end up with those festive arrangements on my front lawn. Here’s what we have so far:

That’s Jake’s Frankenstein monster, dancing in the (cold, cold) wind. I more or less told him the story of the Frankenstein monster, censoring it appropriately, of course. What has bedeviled him are the staples on the monster’s face. “Wouldn’t that hurt so much?” he asked. Uh, yeah, probably.

This is Mark’s Dracula. Nothing says Happy Halloween like a blood-thirsty vampire!