How I Would Decorate for Halloween

Pretend that the leaves are all Halloweenish.

Well, I finally pulled my skeleton votive candle porch-standees out of the attic and put them on duty on the deck, and now the National Weather Service is advising people to bring in anything that could blow around in the wind and cause AllState-caliber mayhem on property and people.  So I'm glad I didn't knock myself out decorating for Halloween.  I just have to bring in the skeletons from the deck.

But one of these years, I have a really cool idea for decorating for Halloween, but it'll have to be a year where we don't have this cold, rainy weather.  It's happened!

See, my 1970 AMC Gremlin (pictured above) is Big Bad Orange- I named her Ginger.  And a lot of people think she's a goofy-looking car.  I think she's goofy-looking AND adorable, and is pretty much the ultimate Halloween decoration.

What I want to do is bring my Gremlin out to the front yard and park it so it faces the intersection, and then make big eyes for in the windshield, so it looks like there's a creature in the yard.  I know that the most accepted way to anthropomorphize an automobile is to use the headlights as eyes, but I'm going for big brushstrokes on this one, something that needs to be seen from a couple hundred feet away, and the windshield provides a LOT of valuable visual real estate for this.

An alternate approach to the Halloween decorations using my Gremlin would be affixing a green stem, pumpkin leaves, and tendrils to Ginger's roof and parking her in the yard to be a pumpkin.  Or I could combine the two ideas and have an AMC Jack-o-lantern, with the pumpkin bits and monster-eyes.

There's three years' worth of Ginger-based Halloween fun, right there!  But like I said, Ginger's a 40+ year-old car, so she deserves to live in the garage in inclement weather, not to be out and exposed to all the elements.  Cold and rain makes her temperamental.  I can't blame her a bit for that.  I'm a 1978, and I get cranky if I'm left out in the cold, too!  So my brilliant Halloween decoration plans for Ginger will need to wait for another Halloween, when we're not having a storm straight from Hell.  It happens every so often.  Truthfully, up until this very weekend, it would have been a good October to have implemented one of my Ginger decorating ideas.  We've had beautiful weather, all month long. 

Maybe the moral of this story for me should be to make my decorations ahead of time.  I should fashion the pumpkin stem, leaves, and tendrils right now, or as soon as I figure out and get the materials I'd need for such a thing.  I should cut out the big jack-o-lantern eyes and the monster eyes (to change things up a bit!) out of poster board and have them at the ready for next beautiful October. 

That's what I should do.  I want to be more festive around here.  Not Griswald-festive, so the neighbors call me at Christmas to ask me if my house is on fire, but I could do a little better on the outside-decoration front.  I really could.

But right now, I'd better go out and fetch the skeletons from the deck.  I wouldn't be so happy to wake up one of these mornings and find Frankenstorm pitched the skeleton decorations through a window, or grazed the Jeep with them.  Mother Nature really could have decided just to soap everybody's windows instead of this giant mother of all storms crap.  I mean, seriously!