They’re doing it year ‘round now. Moms everywhere are tearing their hair out every time they go to Wal-Mart or Eckerd.
I’m talking about decorations. If we’re not decorating for one thing, we’re decorating for another.
They start putting the Christmas decorations out in August, and you can buy Easter decorations in January. Throw in Halloween, Valentines Day, Thanksgiving and Fourth of July, and we are never free of the WAWGTDFTM (What are we going to decorate for this month?) phenomenon. Especially if you have a son like mine whose goal, it seems, is to have the most decorated yard in the neighborhood.
As soon as the Halloween stuff hit the stores in September, my son crawled up in the attic and hauled out what we had. And begged me to buy more. I had to lock him in the closet to keep him from decorating until now. I told him there was NO WAY we were going to put up Halloween stuff until the calendar at least turned over to October.
If you drove by our house on October 1st, you’ll see he didn’t waste any time.
When I was a kid, Halloween meant (1) carving a pumpkin, and (2) trick-or-treating. There was no decorating of the house involved.
There was no glow-in-the-dark spider web stuff or skulls that chatter their teeth as you walk by. There were not a hundred choices of pumpkin-shaped candleholders or strands of lights in the shape of skeletons.
Going to the store with my kids is especially stressful now, since we always have to pass by the strategically placed rows of wonderful, beautiful, and “really cool” holiday decorations.
“Mom! Look at this cool smoke machine!” Or “Mom! Let’s get a CD with eerie songs on it to play when the kids come to our house trick-or-treating!” Or “Everybody else has some of these yard cut-outs … can’t we get some too?” And a spotlight … and a witch … and … and … and.
My mom tells the story of Christmas when she was a little girl. On Christmas Eve when the children went to bed, there wasn’t a sign of Christmas in the house. After they were sound asleep, my grandparents would bring in the Christmas tree, decorate it from top to bottom, and pile the presents below.
When the kids came down the stairs the next morning, it was as if something magical had happened. The lights were twinkling, the ornaments sparkling, and the room smelled of fresh pine. Talk about kids with wonder in their eyes!!
Nowadays, by the time Christmas day comes, the tree is dead and the decorations look pretty sad. Same with Halloween stuff. I’ll bet that by the time October 31st rolls around, the spider web we have on the front of the house has real bugs stuck in it.
My son has hung a big sheet of plastic across our front porch with glow-in-the-dark things painted on it. My husband says it looks like we’re being treated for termites.
A strobe light blinks furiously, enough to cause any Mom to hit the Tylenol. The dog barks every time the big spider in the tree blows in the wind. And there’s a whole ‘nother box of stuff he hasn’t unpacked yet.
So why do we Moms do it? Because it makes the kids so happy. Because we’re making good memories for our children.
Besides, when my son cranks up the smoke machine on Halloween night, it’s gonna be pretty cool.
