A Little Halloween Spirit

This weekend I got to decorate the house for Halloween. It was a nice distraction from the news. I had quite a large stockpile of homemade ornaments, and I found a place for every one!

Making ornaments helped me get through the worst of the summer. I spent the dog days dreaming of moonlit October nights as I stitched up dozens of sequin-studded, rather poorly constructed felties for my Halloween tree. I’d sit on the floor in the dining room and sew as I drank Raspberry Zinger out of an old spaghetti sauce jar and listened to the classic radio series Suspense on my phone. Meanwhile, the cats snoozed around me, each on a soft pile of felt or a comfy bed of tangled embroidery thread. I made cute little ghosts, owls, bats, and jack-o’-lanterns that were heavily embellished with beads, gold rickrack, and–inevitably–cat fur.

I put up my Halloween tree on Saturday afternoon. As Rob watched football in the living room, I sat nearby on the floor trying to assemble the fake tree, which is about three feet tall and made of gold metal. Buntin, our high-spirited tortie, found this work incredibly exciting and couldn’t resist pitching in. The trunk of the tree is made up of multiple interlocking tubes, and pretty soon Buntin had them rolling all around the room. She was even able to pick one up with her paw and toss it out the living room door. It went rolling down the hall with Buntin in hot pursuit. She batted it and chased it, romping up and down the hall. As I continued to put the tree together, I could hear her speeding about and leaping up on various items of furniture . . . and a lamp falling.

After about half an hour, I had the tree together and maybe fifteen ornaments arranged on its delicate golden branches. I placed the tree on an old wooden box in a sunny corner of the living room, the box serving as a sort of pedestal. As I was admiring this setup, Buntin burst in and jumped on the box. In one fell swoop, she knocked over the tree and all the ornaments came off.

“Well,” I said to Rob, “I guess I can’t have a Halloween tree after all.”

“Come on,” Rob encouraged from his football-watching chair, “don’t give up on it.”

“But did you see what just happened?” I said. “I put all those ornaments on, and then Buntin came in and knocked them right off. They all came off.”

“Well,” Rob said, “I think the decorating process is just too exciting for her. You should go out on the front porch and put the decorations on where she can’t see you.”

As I considered Rob’s suggestion, cute little Carl, our brown tabby, started digging in an open storage box full of fragile, tissue-paper-wrapped ornaments. He loves digging in tissue paper.

“Carl,” I said, suppressing a smile, “you’re my precious baby, but I hate what you’re doing right now. “

He kept digging in such a determined fashion that I couldn’t help laughing. “Carl,” I said, giggling, “stop!”

But he didn’t stop, and soon Buntin joined him in the box and started digging too.

I went over to the couch to jot a note in my journal, and as I was writing, Rob provided voice-over for the scene: “Dear Diary, the cats have ruined all my joys in life again. . . .”

Ha! That’s not what I was writing, but I did go out on the porch to decorate the tree. By the time I’d finished adding all the trimmings and carried it back in the house, the cats were napping and didn’t give a hoot.

On Sunday my decorating spree continued. I festooned the mantelpieces in the living room and dining room with black and orange candles and garlands of mini gourds, then decked out the front porch with terra-cotta jack-o’-lanterns, two real pumpkins, and a beloved twenty-year-old skeleton/ghost that consists of a skull and two bony, floating hands draped in a diaphanous white veil.

After I hung up the ghost, I stood on the porch for a minute assessing everything. I had planned to arrange some stuff in the yard, but then I decided I didn’t need to. The yard was already festive, adorned with bright berries and so many flowers–goldenrod, purple mistflower, black-eyed Susans, pink sasanquas, and rose after rose.

Buntin—quite a character

The yard in all its glittering fall glory: