The other night we hung the Autumn wreath on our door to mark the transition of a new season. Every year around this time I kind of hold my breath because I know it won’t be long until we’re in the holiday cycle of switching out decorations that are stored in the deep bowels of our basement. Then we perform the annual ritual of trashing some stuff and collecting others. Don’t get me wrong, as lazy as I am, and as much as I hate going through the effort of moving boxes of decorations up and down stairs, I understand the necessity of decorating. It is important to mark the seasons, especially since we have a kid, and also because my wife is really the one doing all the work. If it were the other way around I’d do without holidays altogether.
In the before times, before a kid, and before a basement full of decorations, when the holidays would show up I would hold my breath for a different reason. Those were the days when we were just starting out and amassing these ceremonial props. They’re expensive. When you barely have enough money to pay bills or buy food, choosing between dinner and a ceramic pumpkin is difficult. And the thing about collecting all this holiday stuff is that you never know if it will look right, so inevitably a little trial and error is necessary.
Our first decorations for autumn started out as a bundle of fake-looking fall colored flowers that we spray painted black as Halloween started to approach. Then we started sinking money into mums to put on the porch but once the flowers fell off we neglected the poor plants and over the years have probably dispatched an entire small town’s population of them. I had to take a firm stance on ever buying mums again because of the small graveyard of pots on the hidden side of our porch, but in recent years my wife has managed to keep them alive to the point where they actually re-flower at the appropriate times. The same massacre could also be applied to poinsettias around Christmas, but we have figured out the trick to keeping them on life support as well.
The most eventful decorations we ever purchased were one autumn when we really went all-in with our porch façade. We bought corn stalks, which we’ll never do again because they are so messy. We also bought a couple of hay bails for that rustic look but something was missing. We found the solution in the form of about 50 fake crows oddly sold in bundles at a dollar store complete with beady eyes and real feathers. My wife ripped a large branch out of a tree and painstakingly tied the crows to it with craft wire and placed the mixed-media project next to the other decorations. When she was done it was both a festive and eerie sight. From only a short distance the crows looked completely real. Their feathers even moved about in the wind.
The first night the decorations were out the neighbors all walked by and commented on how impressive our display was. We finally felt like real adults with real decorations. Then, the next morning we were awoken by an awful commotion in our front yard. Apparently a few crows passing by noticed the fake crows and starting trying to talk to them. I went outside to shoo them off but within minutes they were back and were getting closer and closer to the fake crows to inspect them and figure out why they weren’t talking back.
As the day went on more and more crows started showing up and yelling at the fake crows. It was a fascinating site but extremely loud. After a certain point in the day, they stopped responding to me even trying to scare them off. The next morning we woke up to something out of a Hitchcock movie. An actual ‘murder of crows’ was out there cawing and crowing and every once and a while coming in closer to peck at the fake crows and taunt them. Crows in the yard, in the trees, on the roof, on the cars. It was uncomfortable.
We removed the fake birds, I hosed off the driveway and cars, and everything went back to normal. They have now been added to the plastic bin where they come out once a year to perch atop our fireplace. The only decorations for fall will be the trusty old autumn wreath, maybe a few pumpkins, and we’ll remove the IV bag from the mums temporarily and attach it to the poinsettia. Now I just have to bide my time until the cold afternoon in the future where I get to hold my breath again and see how many Christmas lights didn’t make it through their 11-month basement slumber.