Boys becoming men, men becoming wolves

As some of you know, I’ve been very excited about having our first Halloween in this house. This will be the first time in eight years that no one will be stabbed or shot outside my home on Halloween. And we get trick-or-treaters!

I feel I need to decorate the house thoroughly, so neighborhood kids know that a Halloween-friendly family with the best candy lives here. In search of inspiration (and maybe to cheat with some store-bought decorations), I went into one of those seasonal Spirit Halloween stores yesterday.

Yikes. Every you look, severed limbs. Feet, hands, heads. And if you’re not looking at a bloody rubber stump, you’re looking at dessicated corpses and gooky zombies that pop out at you from behind foam gravestones. I was so terrified I had to leave the store immediately.

Now, I know kids today are a much hardier breed than I am, with their video games and their movies (and their hair and their music), but I have to think of their poor parents as well. I can’t festoon my home with severed body parts and expect some terrified dad who’s never played BioShock to walk his kid up to the scary house.

I guess I am going to have to make my own decorations. Cute little ghosts, skeletons in top hats, that sort of thing. I’m sure the kids would prefer things to get gruesome, but someone has to think of the poor adults.