Even though it doesn’t feel like fall – summer is back with a vengeance (and those damn mosquitoes have never gone away) – it’s officially spooky season at MarTar Manor.
Did I go overboard with the skeletons this year? No bones about it! (Or lots of bones about it, I s’pose…)
But I was feeling so damn creative with these displays, I couldn’t be stopped. This is what happens when you have a bordering-on-unhealthy fascination with Halloween. I’d love to blame it on “having little kids,” but that ship sailed 20 years ago. Unless cats count.
(They don’t.)
The truth is, I’ve always wanted to be a Destination House. One of those places (there’s one in every neighborhood) that people go out of their way to check out every holiday because the decorations are so impressive. They don’t call me Clark Griswold for nothing!
OK, fine, nobody has ever actually called me Clark Griswold. Other than me. But we do share many of the same personality traits: optimism, enthusiasm, idealism, a strong desire for a perfect family experience. Clark is a loving dad and a devoted husband (except when Christie Brinkley is splashing around naked in a swimming pool, but we all have our weaknesses). He’s also temperamental and obsessive, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, because I am neither of those things.
Quit laughing, babe!
(Tara is definitely the Ellen to my Clark, humoring me while constantly keeping me in check.)
Clark’s jam is December. I’ve never really been able to compete with the Christmas Light Kellys of the world, but I might just have a shot at Halloween. Give me a few more years and another dozen skeletons, and we’ll be ghoul to go!
Fine. Maybe I’m a little obsessive.
A whole lotta pumpkins and corn
Before spending three hours decorating the yard, we drove to Deerfield and stocked up on pumpkins.
On the way home, I called my parents for our weekly chat.
“Hey, we just spent $70 on pumpkins!” I said excitedly, my Clark Griswold-like enthusiasm on rampant display.
“Well, that was stupid,” my mom replied without missing a beat.
Geez, mom. Not one to mince words, are you? Sorry I didn’t discover the cure for polio or solve the the Riemann Hypothesis (yet).
Granted, $70 is a lot of money to spend on gourds, but Destination House, remember? Besides, after Halloween, we go all Billy Corgan and smash the pumpkins, scattering them around our property to provide food for the critters. It’s like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom around here, yo.
Please tell me you get the reference and know who Marlon Perkins is. (Nope, not the guy from The Godfather – wrong Marlon! And not King Arthur’s magician. That’d be Merlin.). If not, at least have the decency to lie. My delicate, aging ego would prefer not to be bruised.
After my mom’s verbal beat-down, I was afraid to tell her we’d also picked up four dozen ears of sweet corn from our favorite farm stand in Cambridge.
Which also sounds extreme. I don’t know which is worse: $70 worth of pumpkins or 48 ears of corn.
(OK, five life-size plastic skeletons from Menards is worse than both.)
But we had a good, non-stupid reason, mom – I swear! Tara blanches the corn, cuts it off the cob, portions it out, vacuum-seals it, and freezes it. Then, we have (oxymoron alert!) fresh frozen corn to tide us over for the next nine months or so. It’s way better than anything you can buy in the store. This year, we used up our last bag in June, right around the time fresh corn was available again.
Do we know how to game the system or what?!
Speaking of corn, funny aside: I never understood why they called it an “ear” of corn. Granted, my knowledge of anatomy is limited, but you don’t have to be an audiologist to see that corn on the cob looks nothing like an ear.
This looks like an ear:
Which is why this pasta shape is called orecchiette (the Italian word for “little ears”). A perfectly logical name. But what about corn?
Well. Thanks to Google, I learned that this particular ear is an Indo-European agricultural word for the spiky part of a cereal plant that contains its flowers or seeds. Old English farmers also grew ears of barley, wheat, and rice.
I assume there’s no need to look up “head” of lettuce as that one seems pretty obvious. I’m all Googled out today anyway.
Mark My Words 
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