Change of seasons can take a long time
From my bed at night, I can look out the window at all the Christmas lights. From here, the neighborhood twinkles like a disco ball. The mansion across the street appears to have a bedazzled tree in every window. The neighbors to the left light up a nativity scene in the front yard every year. A bit further down the street, two houses have tall toy soldiers standing guard at their front doors.
Our house? It’s the one with the two jack-o’-lanterns standing guard at the door.
Not real pumpkins, of course; those would be rotting blobs of orange by now. The pumpkins on our porch are wooden, carved from tree trunks at a harvest festival years ago and hauled from the garage every October. Each is the size of a large exercise ball, and I use that reference because to move one even a few feet is an aerobic workout. Moving one is equal to moving a tree trunk.
Last fall, Patrick moved them from the garage in a wheelbarrow, having lifted them in and out amid loud storms of profanity. We put candles in them the week of Halloween; we had the biggest jack-o’-lanterns on the street. We put off moving them back to the garage, knowing it was a miserable chore that could wait another day. And then I came home one day in November and found the mighty pumpkin heads were turned around with their faces toward the house, and tall plants were sprouting from the tops.
“They look like tiki heads,” I said. “And not in a good way.”
But tiki bar it was. For the weeks leading up to Christmas, our Victorian house sported an island theme.
“Or a colonial one,” Patrick said. “If you look at them a certain way, they look like welcome pineapples.”
But now it was December, and the pumpkin heads had to go. Patrick made a pitch for a Christmas version: big, wooden Santa heads with triangle eyes, but where were we to find red hats that large?
Days passed and the pumpkins weren’t moving. I decorated the front door with a wreath and garland; put up a huge tree next to the door; festooned the porch stairs with poinsettias. And still, the eye went right to the pumpkin heads.
“All I want for Christmas is for those heads to be gone,” I said one day last weekend. But it was a busy time, and the heads were far down the list.
When I was in my 20s and had a first apartment, I put up a Christmas tree right after Thanksgiving. Come Easter, it was still up. I like to think it was my nod to Charles Dickens’ famous quote about honoring Christmas in my heart and keeping it all the year. More likely, I was busy, or just plain lazy.
There are no lazy people in this house now. But those heads are heavy. It’s easier to make them part of the landscape than to put them away.
I woke up Christmas Eve morning, walked out the front door, and found the pumpkin heads were gone. While I slept, Santa or someone had hauled the heads back to the garage. Christmas dreams really do come true.
And so from our front porch to yours, Merry Christmas. And a Happy Halloween.
Beth Dolinar can be reached at cootiej@aol.com.