Too Scary?

 Upon seeing my ghoulish Halloween cemetery in front of our house, my six-year-old granddaughter Gwen scolded, “Your yard is too scary for the neighborhood.”

Since my youngest five grandkids moved to Michigan this year, they've gotten to know their grandpa here better, particularly my affinity for Halloween and all things scary. I drove three of them and their cousin fifty miles north to participate in the Halloween Ghosts and Goodies Event which included a ride on a real ghost train. 

My wife and I also took the three youngest, including two-month-old Miles, to a pumpkin hunt in the woods.

Some things are too scary for them . . . like my “zombie mask” hung from a nail in a brick on my house. Four-year-old Charlie was so terrified by it that I put it back into storage. Still, every time Charlie would exit our front door afterwards, it was head first so he could take a peek at the wall near our porch to make sure the mask was still gone.

I don't deliberately try to scare them but sometimes I slip up. When my wife and went over to their house to help decorate Halloween cookies I forgot that the t-shirt I was wearing had images of Jason, Chuckie, Freddie as well as other horror icons. I'd no sooner walked into their house when Gwen said, “Could you go home and change your shirt. Charlie and I get nightmares very easily.”

I turned my shirt inside out and wore it that way. I've heard they do that sometimes with offensive t-shirts at school. That satisfies the principal and my shirt reversal satisfied Gwen and Charlie.

Since Gwen is in first grade and learning addition and subtraction now, I gave her this little Halloween math problem. If you have two skeletons in one bucket and three skeletons in another bucket, how many buckets do you have? “Five,” she said. “Wrong,” I replied. Then right away she corrected herself: “Two. I thought you were going to say skeletons.”

I'll have to post here a picture of my Halloween yard display lit up at night and you can judge whether it's too scary.

Here's another little anecdote regarding my graveyard. We had a recliner delivered a couple weeks ago. When the deliverymen arrived, I heard the doorbell ring. I'm sure the deliveryman heard it too from outside. We knew approximately when the chair was being delivered so we were prepared to move quickly to answer the door. And I did move quickly.

But apparently not quickly enough. The delivery guy knocked at the door while I was en route, then knocked again as I arrived to open it. Patience! You have to figure that whoever orders a recliner is likely someone who doesn't move too quickly.

When I opened the door, the deliveryman deadpanned, “You have dead people in your yard.”

“What?” I asked, trying to understand what he meant.

“You have dead people in your yard,” he repeated.

“Oh, my Halloween decorations,” I said realizing what he was referring to. I didn't think my ghoulish props would make an impression on adults. But maybe it did. That was the quickest delivery and set-up I'd ever experienced.