Nothing in the front of my home screams of a modern Halloween - no inflatable monsters or robotic zombies. Rather I prefer strategically placed suggestions of All Hallows Eve, the dead and their spirits (all in good fun, of course), like the small tombstone rising alone among the shrubs and plants at the beginning of the front walk.
A little further along the walk, a bleached skull rests among the dead leaves and the last struggling flowers of the season. One immediatedly wonders where the rest of the skeletal remains lie.
And lastly on the front porch next to the door is an ordinary potted fern on an iron stand. But wait, what dwells beneath the fronds? A menacing blackbird, perched on the top half of another skull, peers at visitors and guards his haunt. Perhaps I have been inspired by historian Steven Loud's interepretation of the holiday -
the festival of Samhain, meaning Summer's End, was by far the most important of the four quarter days in the medieval Irish calendar, and there was a sense that this was the time of year when the physical and supernatural worlds were closest and magical things could happen...
Nothing in the front of my home screams of a modern Halloween - no inflatable monsters or robotic zombies. Rather I prefer strategically placed suggestions of All Hallows Eve, the dead and their spirits (all in good fun, of course), like the small tombstone rising alone among the shrubs and plants at the beginning of the front walk.
A little further along the walk, a bleached skull rests among the dead leaves and the last struggling flowers of the season. One immediatedly wonders where the rest of the skeletal remains lie.
And lastly on the front porch next to the door is an ordinary potted fern on an iron stand. But wait, what dwells beneath the fronds? A menacing blackbird, perched on the top half of another skull, peers at visitors and guards his haunt. Perhaps I have been inspired by historian Steven Loud's interepretation of the holiday - the festival of Samhain, meaning Summer's End, was by far the most important of the four quarter days in the medieval Irish calendar, and there was a sense that this was the time of year when the physical and supernatural worlds were closest and magical things could happen...
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