Our Halloween decorations for this year. Please to ignore the date on the pictures, that should be 10/30 or 11/03 or something. I’m not taking pictures in the future of decorations already taken down.
“The Guy,” as the Bean calls him, lit by green and hanging dead and ghoulish in the tree. He’s the first thing we put out every year. 
A view of the guy with a flash. New digital camera turns night into day. Yeah, my cellphone AND my digital camera bit the dust last week. 
The spiderweb J made. It gets a lot of comments. As in ooo cool and CREEPY.
More of the spiderweb, with flash
Going towards the front door from the right. There are skeletons with big heads, the windows are decorated and there’s a metal wreath. We also take the regular lights out of the front lamps and put in flickering flame lights
On this one you can see the skull windchime that rattles and clanks when sound hits it, which it does quite often
The front door. Our kitten liked eating the gel cats, pumpkins and skulls I put on the door windows. She also
seemed to enjoy barfing them up.
Hard to see, but hidden under the giant cobwebs, our oldest boom box playing a spooky sounds cd and a fog machine.
There are also some metal jack o’lanterns on stakes. The candles had blown out.
Sadly this is the year we have to retire the arch (says welcome, black metal, spiders, bats…and it fell apart when J took it down).
I’m really going to miss it and we have to find something to take it’s place.
There is a tiny little skull fence along the bottom, lit with purple lights. This again is a flash turning night into
day to show some detail. James is building a new fence with skull finials for next year. I need to figure out
a gate.It might be hard to see, but many of the gravestones are plywood shapes painted grey but–the names are
all characters from Lovecraft! (No one ever gets it but me).
The coffin from last year fell apart, so we only have the lid. We’re going to get a slightly smaller sized toe pincher coffin made
we can reuse. The pumpkin in the front yard Bean made with our incredible neighbors and there are three other pumpkins
in the back lit up with different faces. I think by this point we’d already taken down the giant skull in the window.
And THAT is just the outside. We have more plans for next year. Animatronics, a new gate and fence, a better coffin.
We have a reputation to keep up. We freaking OWN Halloween in our neighborhood. We got a great amount of trick or treaters this year, easily 75.
The only bad thing about Halloween? It ends too soon.
I can’t wait until the day when we live in a single family house with a real front yard so we can decorate like crazy for Halloween. We’re currently in a townhouse with big steep steps leading up to the front door and it just ain’t the same.
Thanks for sharing the photos of your “Passion of the Dead”! Do you have any spare bones lying around? One of my favorite illusions is a random skeletal hand or head popping up from the ground. And a shovel. If I had a yard, I’d give you a run for your money!
Has anyone complained about the ‘hanging man’? Given the current attention paid to the history of the noose, I congratulate you for providing some broad context for this symbol. Before about two months ago, the noose was simply an expression of criminality or suicide, for me. That it has taken on a more racially charged meaning of late (in the media) really bothers me. It’s like using a car wreck to illustrate the dangers of alcoholism. Yes, the two conditions have some crossover when a DUI becomes a twisted pile of metal, but a thorough understanding of of how alcoholism destroys lives does not logically flow from a flaming wreck in the center lane. Of course I learned about lynchings and terrorizing people with this symbol (and others) as part of the history of race relations in our country, but I had assumed we had all moved on from that terrible time.
Using symbols like the jack-o-lantern and various costumes, Halloween is a tradition of exposing and representing our fear of damnation, an unsettled afterlife, or the ultimate judgement of our actions in life (http://njnj.essortment.com/jackolantern_reuu.htm). While not all people swinging from the end of a rope are truly damned, “The Guy” hanging from your tree obviously met a sticky end and allows me to ponder many possibilities as to the current state of his soul. It is appropriate to re-contextualize our fears to lessen the hold they have over us. Any chance he might have a friend next year who will be wearing a white sheet and pointy hood? I bet HE would get some comments from the neighbors…Hey, I wonder if I could…
PS: I love reading, too, but I don’t always need a book in order to “read” a good story.