HARVESTING THE BODY PART FARM

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I really love Halloween, if for no other reason that it makes the children in the neighborhood frightened of me.

You see, in my arrested state of emotional development, I still see Halloween as a great time to dress up in a costume, decorate the house, and give children pause to wonder if maybe, just maybe, I am the reason some of the cats in the neighborhood have disappeared. Unfortunately, I am no longer afforded the luxury of bringing out all of the fun of spooking the neighborhood kids (SOMEBODY in the house thinks that terrifying children is not nice, but we won’t name names). But I remember back to a time when instilling terror into the heart of neighbor kids was just good ol’ fashioned fun. For me. It was nightmare fodder for them.

It all started a few years ago when my wife and I were hosting a Halloween party. It was on one of the years when Halloween fell on a Friday, so we had the party on the actual Halloween night. My wife and I decided that in order to have a successful Halloween party, you need to decorate every inch of the home with something. We of course had all of the standards: orange and black lights, a Pscyho scene in the bathroom, and fake cobwebs spread throughout the house, guaranteeing that you will be finding fake cobwebs still stuck in the house for the next seven decades. On the plus side, it removes the need to dust in corners and around window sills, because if anyone points out the disgusting nature of your house, you can just say that they’re decorations from a party. Granted, if it’s the middle of June and you say this, you still look like a slob, but at least not the kind of slob that harvests live spiders.

We then decided to go one step further and plant what we called the body part farm. There were several mannequins at my parents’ house that would be used for this. Now, you may be wondering why there were mannequins at my parents’ house. Let’s just say that we aren’t exactly welcome at some department stores anymore. Just a phase we went through as a family.

We took the mannequins apart and began planting arms, legs, hands and feet throughout the yard. We doctored up the torsos with shirts and masks and parked them in windows. As we surveyed the yard, we thought we had come up with a right clever look for the partygoers to enjoy.

So we were all prepared for the party to start when it occurred to us: trick-or-treaters were going to come to our house, and it’s a pretty safe bet that a three-year-old dressed as a Teletubby wasn’t going to be too keen on the idea of a leg growing out of the yard.

The first kid who came up to the yard stood at the curb and went into rigid mode. His father tried to coax him up towards the house. Nothing doing. He stared in horror at the house and the yard, probably wondering if his body parts were about to be planted as well.

Sensing his fear, I ran from the house with a chainsaw blaring, all the while flashing a strobe light in his face.

Now do you really think I would do that? Well, of course you do. But I didn’t. Instead, I strolled out to the curb with the candy, told the youngster that everything was OK, and that he could have some candy without going to the house. He seemed appreciative of the candy, but he did avoid my house for a considerable amount of time. I suppose it beats the alternative, though, of eggs and maybe some arson. Through the course of the evening, I would bet that I went to the curb more often than the kids came to the house.

While I plan on decorating the house again this year, my wife has told me that I can no longer go to the level of scaring children with body parts. “There’s too many small children,” she says. That’s her excuse for everything.

So I have gone from the more brutal and gruesome decorations to some lights, a few knick-knacky things here and there, and something my wife calls “pumpkin topiaries.” I’m pretty sure she made that last word up.

But just because I can’t plant a body part farm in the front yard, it doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the cerebral frights of Halloween. I will still don my costume and give out candy to the children, and try my level best to make them think that Ol’ Man Gibbons is just slightly off center. While it won’t be quite the same without the body part farm, I suppose I’ll get by. After all, I’ve still got the chainsaw and strobe light.