Halloween at the Clampetts Buxoms

The day after Halloween, Mr. Buxom and I went for a long walk and admired the Halloween decorations.

OK, we didn't really admire them. With our ceaseless thirst for long, cool, heady draughts of sweet, sweet mockery, we mostly weighed their efforts in the balance, and found them wanting.

Actually, my husband is easily pleased. But I'm a tough judge. When it comes to Halloween decorations, my preference is for the low-key, the traditional, the home-made, the casual, and the inexpensive. However, I am grossly outnumbered by people who can't wait to head to a big box store and come home with a huge inflatable snow globe filled with ghosts.

But some of their efforts met with our approval. I like this house, and I'm not surprised that I also like their Halloween decorations. Sure, they went a little heavy with the painted yard signs,



but the little kids will actually be able to make it all the way up the walk to get their candy--without pissing their costumes with fright. Painted yard signs? $5.00. Dry Halloween costume? Priceless.

This is a typical example of Newtopian over-the-top-ness. We have the cobwebs, gravestones, skeletons, giant spiders



but we also have the corn stalks, seasonal wreath, and colorful mums. It's like a schizophrenic lives there, and he can't decide whether he's tasteful or tacky, so he decided to be both.

These people had an impressive number of expressive pumpkins.



We awarded big points for all that carving.

Some people go kind of overboard when it comes to inflatable lawn decorations



to the point where their front yards look like a carnival bounce house.



I mean, seriously, they could charge admission. Click on the pictures if you want to see the inflatable hearse filled with ghosts.

I loved these ghosts



but I suspect that they had help hanging them from their trees. They're twenty feet off the ground, suspended from long wires.

In fact, I'm beginning to wonder whether people are outsourcing their Halloween decorations to those companies that will come and put up Christmas lights. It would explain a lot.





Either that or it's Halloween at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

After all the judgey judgmentalism, it's nice to head home to the Clampetts-y end of town, to the lovable shack where the Buxoms started off the whole decorate-your-house-for-Halloween by making ghosts out of our old sheets


A particularly woebegone example

and putting out a few pumpkins


Which we didn't even bother to carve

There are purple icicle lights in the Japanese maple, and orange ones in the evergreens. OK?



Look, I know our yard looks lame. And messy. I mean, can you believe the nerve of us? There are dead leaves on our walk!

But dig my newly-treated moss-free cedar roof and our new cee-ment driveway. (I know what you're thinking, "So what?" but trust me; our neighbors are thrilled.) And to those of you who are wondering "Where's the giant purple inflatable spider?" give it time. My daughter has gone from the kid who made me walk up to the door past all the rotting zombie corpses complete with putrefied flesh to get her a candy bar to someone who wants the whole nine yards: pumpkins, ghosts, black cats, grave yards, dry ice, inflatables, arachnids, freshly-dug graves, the entire Universal pictures prop closet, and this motion-activated screaming death's head



which gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "I'm doomed."