Though I’d love to agree with the sentiment expressed by Anne of Green Gables — “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers” — recently, I’ve come to wish we could skip the month altogether. Or at least its most prominent holiday, Halloween. Instead of enjoying potted mums, hay bales, and glorious leaf colors, Americans of late seem determined to fill their neighborhoods with all manner of tacky, trashy decor. We must turn our lawns into graveyards, pull skeletons out of our closets, and waste untold amounts of money on inflatable abominations. For a whole month we annoy our neighbors with sickly orange string lights, offend all spiders by covering our porches in fake webbing, and terrify small children with ten-foot statues of the grim reaper. A killjoy I may be, but I am not here to police what people put in their yards.
The real issue is this: Three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, Americans rail against violence and condemn crime. But as soon as Halloween approaches, houses and stores are spattered with blood, guts, and gore, and kids dressed up as serial killers are considered “cute.” What gives?
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