Let’s See Scary, Not Gross This Halloween

Despite what many stores decided MONTHS ago, Halloween still falls at the end of October.  At the moment, kids are deciding what they’re going to be, parents are stocking up on candy, and many of us are getting ready to decorate our yards.

The range of decorations available for purchase is astounding.  Pumpkins, scarecrows, spiders, vampires, witches, ghosts, monsters – very cool and, from the perspective of little kids, pretty nonthreatening.  Then you have the gross, often gratuitous stuff – body parts, dummies hanging from trees, monsters with horns drooling blood out of the corners of their mouth.  Decorations appalling, to me, in their depictions of violence.  Can you imagine how horrifying it is to little kids who are seeing material like that? 

I fully get the First Amendment concept of “freedom of expression.”  But it mystifies me why it’s okay to psychologically injure small children with graphic, disfigured images in public.

Last year, as I drove my kids to school, we passed several houses on the way with gruesome Halloween displays I didn’t approve of, so I found another road to take that didn’t contain decorations like that.  But what if you live next to a house that expresses its love of Halloween with the macabre?  And what if your little girl is horrified, maybe even traumatized by those images?  And what if, despite gentle discussions with your neighbors, they won’t tone down their decorations a bit?  As a parent, what do you do? 

It hasn’t happened to me and I don’t foresee that situation arising, but I do know of a family that used to have to walk past a particularly horrifyingly decorated house to get their small ones to school.  I remember hearing the mother loudly ordering the cowering children “Don’t look! We’re almost at the school!”  This went on for weeks until the offending yard was cleared after Halloween.  I understand the kids still have nightmares about the dismembered, bloody hands on the lawn, the ghostly image swinging from a tree, and the bloody dummy emerging from a coffin.  Who wouldn’t?

So I’m hoping, this year, that some of my neighbors show a modicum of restraint with their Halloween decorations.  Let’s put gratuitous displays of violence out of the eyesight of those who are so small and impressionable.  Let’s find other ways to celebrate this magical fun holiday without traumatizing toddlers, preschoolers, and other children.  And let’s show each other that, in Livingston, we genuinely care about little kids.