Halloween in my neck of the woods, begins on October 1st. If you want to purchase Halloween stuff you can certainly do so in July, because the decorations are readily available. When you live in the Halloween Capital of the World, you could be shamed if you don’t at least have a pumpkin or ten outside your front door. I live in Anoka, Minnesota. Maybe you didn’t know, but way back on November 1, 1919, the residents of this little community woke up to all sorts of nasty pranks which had been played the night before. Those pranks were not the usual toilet paper related ones, but cows actually were freely roaming the streets of this little town as well as in the county jail. Outhouses had been turned over. Wagons were placed precariously on rooftops. All of this was done by some local youth, who thought it would be fun to create havoc. I wonder how those kids were disciplined after that Halloween night of rowdiness. After the incident, the townspeople came together to take it into their own hands. They organized Halloween festivities for the following year. They planned things like “trick or treating,” decorations, parties and things to keep the young goblins off the streets. Thus, Halloween as we know it today is now celebrated with great fanfare in Anoka, MN. We have ghost tours, parades, decorations – all kinds of festivities to celebrate the holiday in an orderly fashion. The face of a jack-O’lantern adorns one of the roundabouts in the city. There are still those little stinkers who like to play tricks on Halloween today, but I haven’t seen any cows walking down the street lately.

Well, the first year we lived in our little, old house on the freeway, we decorated with little ghosts hanging from the lilac bushes. Witches smashed into tree trunks – all the trappings to celebrate a holiday I’m not particularly fond of. We made a scarecrow out of some old costumes I didn’t need anymore. I purchased way too many decorations including orange lights to fill the yard. I felt kind of silly, because no one on our block, except me, had decorated. Maybe our neighbors didn’t know that Anoka was the Halloween Capital of the World. This year, I bought a real pumpkin, which sits on the table in our dining room, surrounded by some fake autumn leaves. That’s the extent of my holiday decorating. Maybe I’m just getting old. Maybe I’m thinking about trying to get the Halloween decorations up and then having to take them down again in November, so we can put up the Christmas stuff. Maybe I should just move to another town.