If a foreign visitor wants to get a sense of the American heartland, reading the columns and blog posts of James Lileks is a good start. Today, he’s discussing Halloween. An excerpt:
All the Halloween stuff came out today. There’s not much, but I remember (insert coot-signifying harmonica melody here) when there wasn’t any Halloween stuff to take out, let alone put away. Maybe one skeleton from the Ben Franklin, conveniently jointed so you could fold it up. Now we have rot-free faux pumpkins, strings of pumpkin lights, pumpkin bobbleheads, pumpkin bowls, pumpkin snowglobes, and pumpkin bubble-blowing bottles left over from three years ago. (I know, because I can carbon-date the detritus from the graphics. Target changes their Halloween designs every year.) I suppose I could dig down deep and find something horribly wrong about this, but I can’t; there’s nothing wrong with Halloween that November 1st can’t cure. No one wakes on December 26th to find the tree has been half-consumed by rodents. Pumpkins, on the other hand, have their faces chewed off in the night.
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