Why We Don’t Have Halloween Decorations Anymore

We’ve been in the rental townhouse in Virginia-Highlands for two months now, and we’ve almost fully unpacked. I’d like to say we have time now to put up Halloween decorations, but we don’t have them anymore. The story of why we don’t have any decorations is the story of what happened to us the last decade, so it’s as easy a way to catch up this blog as any.

The kids and I used to love decorating for Halloween, starting with the year we went to a pumpkin patch the first year the youngest could walk, around 2009. We went outside the city with some of our oldest friends who had just moved to Atlanta and set the whole thing up. We went on a hayride, and the tiny girls picked one orange and one white pumpkin from the field. I carved classic jack-o-lanterns and placed them on the front porch of our loft in Inman Park near Little Five Points. Over the years, we collected more decorations. A first, we just put out ghosts I made of old bedsheets and things the kids brought home from school projects. Around 2011 we gained parts of a teaching skeleton a babysitter found in a dumpster and started hanging the realistic looking bits in the tree near our porch. As our fortunes rose in the following years there were fake tombstones and a few other pieces from Target, including a full plastic skeleton that could fold away neatly the eleven months of the year it wasn’t in use.

My crowning piece of Halloween décor was something I had wanted for years, a pottery jack-o-lantern from Mexico about thirty inches tall sold by Kroger I bought in 2014. The terracotta clay was thick and heavy, with the natural dark orange accented with dark green at the top for the stem. The shape was tall and skinny, pinched a bit in the middle like a malformed gourd, and the face was frightening. I adored this piece of Halloween. It was permanent and something we never could have afforded before. With an electric light puck inside the jack-o-lantern was the perfect combination of scary and dumb. I loved it. I loved that we could own something specific to a holiday that wasn’t strictly functional and was strong enough that I use it for the rest of my life. I loved that we had enough money that I could buy something seasonal and expensive from the grocery store that wasn’t food. I had always admired these imports from Mexico stacked in front of Kroger every year, and in 2014, the year I made the most money I ever would, I had one.

I don’t own the terracotta jack-o-lantern anymore. Last March, I smashed it to pieces.

Like everything else, the gain and loss of our Halloween decorations followed our family fortunes. After building up that steady supply of fun stuff, it all outgrew the loft we owned on Dekalb Avenue, and in 2018 we moved into a rental house – quite a famous one in Little 5, right across from the community center where Austin meets Euclid. There, at the heart of the neighborhood’s Halloween parade, our family went all out for our favorite holiday. We bought a giant inflatable black cat that looked ready to pounce and moved its head from side to side. The husband and our oldest daughter climbed up on the rental house roof and managed to anchor and plug in the cat up there so that it surveyed all who passed. People took pictures, and the neighbors complimented us. We tried to buy that house, but the owner, who was devoted to demolition by neglect for the historic home laughed in our faces. Half a million dollars, the amount we had been approved for by the bank, was not enough. The neighbors mourned our leaving when we finally bought the closest house in our school district we could afford. After over fifteen years living within the same square mile of Inman Park near Little five, the husband and I bought a house in Lake Claire.

The house in Lake Claire was bigger by nearly three times to any house I had lived in before, three stories of fixer-upper madness. I was sad the first Halloween when I realized there were no external plugs for the inflatable black cat, but we had plans to have all the electrical redone, so I stored the cat with the idea that it would come back in a year or two. That first year we threw the random bones and skeleton around the yard, put the jack-o-lantern out near the corner. I took the youngest daughter to the Lake Claire neighborhood pumpkin carving where she had a great time. I bought a few more decorations, as for the first time we had a big yard, but none of them really worked. The ghost that should fly on a string didn’t. The solar-powered light up skulls died in the first rains, and birds nested in the dragon skull. Still, next year decorations would be better. The kids went up and down Page avenue for the first time with the husband, a Lake Claire street blocked off with over-the-top decorations with all the other neighborhood kids. The amount of candy they brought home was so incredible that I found secret piles of it stashed around the house for months later. The next year was 2020.

Quarantine Halloween was our skeleton poised on the corner around a plastic cauldron full of candy. Contactless trick-or-treating happened up and down surrounding streets. Still fun, as neighbors built candy chutes and pinned bags of treats to clotheslines. No electrical work on the house, so no inflatable cat. Well, things would get better.

Last Halloween – 2021 – my niece and nephew came up from Augusta for the first time, and the four kids and all the adults hit Page Avenue. I knew it was likely the last year for my kids, who were 13 and 15. The older child was late in growing tall, so the party of four did well, especially with the two cute small cousins with them. I was drowning in work and the lawn had just the bones thrown haphazardly and the one skeleton now. The ghost that should light up and fly on a string hung carelessly on a branch like an afterthought, but my jack-o-lantern was at least right against the house in the driveway, so we could see it when I came home every day exhausted. In the days after last year’s Halloween, I would beg the kids to help me clean up the stuff. They did so near Thanksgiving, setting the decorations near the front door. Because of the way the Lake Claire house worked, I couldn’t put the items away in the attic myself, because opening the dangerous attic ladder was a two-person job. I asked the husband for help, but he was trying not to drown himself, as his solitary law practice shut down at last after eighteen months without a full workload. He went back to bartending at the Fox as he had when we first married, and then to ninety-day job helping with COVID PPP loans six days a week while we struggled to overcome our own financial COVID disaster.

The decorations sat on the porch through winter, collecting dirt and real cobwebs. I wanted to put them away, but every day I came home from work to find something else broken in the giant fixer upper I hated more daily. All the doors stuck when it rained. We had constant plumbing issues. The money we had set aside for fixing drainage and landscape problems was used to float us while the husband’s law practice stumbled, then failed, leaving me to do what I could on the weekends. I was always tired, and the kids had morphed into teenagers who wanted to fight me any time I asked for help.

In late March of 2022, my work gave me the opportunity to travel again for the first time in two years. A conference was being held in Portland, where my middle sister had just moved for a career change. I was able to fly across the country for almost a week, stay with my sister, and get some much-needed time away from the house. I had a great trip, and then on the way home suffered a chain of mishaps too mundane and stupid to document. It all ended with me alone on the porch on a Friday evening far away from a school event for the younger child I had desperately wanted to attend. I had lost my phone at the last minute in a scramble to get out of a dodgy Uber from the airport, and I was alone.

The Halloween decorations, now fully six months away from legitimate use, stared at me from the front porch. I had asked that they please be put away while I was gone, but of course that hadn’t happened. The teens were still too young for the dangerous attic ladder, and the husband couldn't do it by himself.

I grabbed the terracotta jack-o-lantern and heaved it off the porch as hard as I could onto some rocks below. The sound it made as it smashed irreparably made me feel a little better. Then I took what was left – the sadly aged ghost that had never worked, the remaining bits of scavenged teaching skeleton, the Target skeleton and fake tombstones, all of which were partly broken by age and exposure now – and threw them all away. It was easier to throw away the stuff that get it stored properly, and none of it was whole anymore, anyway.

So, it’s Halloween again on Monday, and we don’t have any decorations at the new place. There’s nowhere to put them anyhow, as the townhouse we’re renting is part of two rows that face each other, not the street. The kids are both in High School now and have plans with their friends. My youngest sister can’t afford the drive from Augusta to bring my niece and nephew up to trick or treat this year. Maybe they’ll visit again next year, when the holiday isn’t on a school night. 2023 will be better. It has to be. It’s 2022, the world is on fire, and nobody knows anything. We’re all just doing our best.