Decoration Expiration

I don’t put up many holiday decorations myself, but I appreciate it when others do. At this point, I know which houses in my neighborhood are going to have witches and pumpkins up in October and shamrocks and leprechauns up in March. I can almost use their displays like calendars. However, I like them so much that I’ve become a bit proprietary about them. For example, I’ll think “the blow-up-Santa neighbors” (as you can see, I don’t know their names, at least not the ones they use in real life) used the same display last year. They’re losing their touch.” Or, “those plastic pumpkins look a bit cheesy. Couldn’t they spring for a real one?”

The thing that’s really been getting my goat lately is Failure to Remove. I’m talking about lingering displays; July 4th displays still up around Memorial Day, New Years’ decorations still up after everyone’s been dating their checks correctly for weeks. But what irks me even more is a new trend I call Display Creep. I’m not talking about perves in the bushes here. I’m talking about only partially removing old decorations while adding the decorations for the next holiday. For example, someone in my neighborhood removed only part of their Halloween decorations before putting up their Thanksgiving display. Now, if the part of the Halloween display they’d left out were pumpkins, even the jack-o-lantern kind, I could accept that. But witches and scarecrows? Come on, I scoffed, who do you think you’re fooling? And if they thought that little burnt orange “Happy Thanksgiving” sign was going to do the trick (or treat), they were sadly mistaken.

A particularly bizarre Failure to Remove situation developed in a “99 cent” store near where I work. The store had a phenomenal Halloween display in their side window, topped off by a huge witch suspended in the front window above the entrance. I enjoyed walking by it every morning on my way to work and couldn’t wait to see what they would do for Thanksgiving. But when November 3rd rolled around with no change in the display, and the Monday after that the jack-o-lantern was still grinning at me from ear to ear, I knew there was a problem. I became concerned for them as a business. Didn’t they have Thanksgiving-type merchandise to sell, or were they just going to push miniature candy bars and black pointy hats the whole year? Curious, I went inside. Just as I thought, the whole front section had turkey, pumpkin pie and pilgrim-themed napkins, paper plates, and every other flimsy thing you can imagine. Which brought me back to my conundrum. Why advertise things you’re no longer selling and not bother advertising the things that you are?

With each day I passed the store, my anxiety grew. Because I was leaving town for the holiday, I wasn’t going to be able to see the store in the few days leading up to the Big Event. Surely, I thought, they would do something by then! But when I returned to work the following Monday, there was that black and orange display, goblins, ghosts and all, still staring at me in all its ghoulish glory. I briefly wondered if there were some kind of Holiday Police that could arrest the store for disrupting the Natural Order of Windows (Or am I thinking of the National Organization for Women?)

Finally, several days after Thanksgiving, the store took down the display – except for the witch. Even when they deigned to put up their Christmas display, that witch continued threatening to drop her broom on incoming customers’ heads until the end of the week. Only then, when that dame and her sweeping mode of transportation were removed, could I heave a sigh of relief.

The following week, looking back at my angst over something so trivial that really had nothing to do with me, I wondered why I had taken it all so personally. As I pondered this question in my apartment, looking at the piles of papers I’d been meaning to go through, shirts I’d been meaning to mend, bills I’d been meaning to sort, and summer clothing I’d been meaning to put in storage, the answer began to dawn on me. The fault, dear readers, was not in the store, but in myself.