Alex's Asteroid Astrology

Due to my 2023 hiatus on Halloween, which came just weeks after knee replacement surgery, it’s been two years since I’ve done things up right here on the property.  Halloween is my favorite holiday, ever since I was a kid, and it was a wrench to give it up last year.  But that’s behind us, and it’s a brave new day, scary brave!

It’s been wonderful to be reunited with the endless Halloween tchotchke I’ve collected over the decades, a true joy, as layers of tissue part to reveal old friends and newer acquisitions I’d completely forgotten about.  But it’s also been fun to create new decorating opportunities.

This is the first year I have decorated the guest room completely, with focused themes, as opposed to a few “overflow” items I wished to display, but which didn’t fit anywhere else.  It’s been newly christened “the HH Room,” for the collections on view there:  Haunted Houses, Headless Horsemen, and the Halloween Hutch, my assemblage of seasonal kitchenware.

I’ve also done a bit of reorganizing downstairs in the main collection, retiring some pieces and eliminating a shelf of hold-over scarecrows from the fall display.  This was done to allow more space for the ghost collection, which has swelled to encompass five shelves from three, and barely fits that enhanced real estate!

The living room Halloween displays also feature sections devoted to skeletons, skulls and Reapers, as well as witches and black cats (of course!).  I now have enough cat-themed pillows to fill the entire couch, so bat pillows have been relegated to one easy chair, jack-o-lantern and witch pillows to another, and skull pillows are up on the guest bed, with the new Headless Horseman throw.  The hallway is dedicated to vampires and bats, which spill over into the guest room as well, while the bathroom is the kingdom of the spiders.

The owls are still roosting in the living room since autumn, and the dining room hutch retains its fall splendor of apple, corn and pumpkin-themed dishes.  The kitchen also showcases the collection of Halloween magnets, paper décor, and wood block pieces.

But it’s outside where the most dramatic changes have occurred.  I’ve acquired, not one, not two, but five new adult skeletons this year, and one child.  I enjoy designing new installations of skellies doing everyday things, so the garden has been transformed into a vast cemetery park, with the permanent residents enjoying a variety of pleasures.

The shade garden is the venue for most of this activity, and formerly showcased a pair of Reapers greeting new arrivals; a trio of picnicking revelers, a father bringing his twins to visit their decomposing mom on Dead Mother’s Day, and a helpful soul assisting his buddy in emerging from the grave.  Just to one side, by the back stoop, the lady of the house, dressed as a witch, is handing out mice and spiders to a gaggle of costumed trick-or-treat skeleton kiddies.

Last year I added a dog walker with a large skeletal hound, which I placed in the front yard, my sole exterior decoration for that season.  This year he’s been translated to the back, and joined by a mother-and-child duo exploring the skeletal birds at the birdbath; a gentleman enjoying his morning coffee and paper; and a skellie roosting in the birch tree, cheering on the efforts of the Good Samaritan below him, trying to exhume his friend.

Not much has changed with the hilltop café scene, of a waiter passing wine to two patrons, except that the area’s vegetation had filled in so much over the past two years that the size of that display has had to shrink.  No worries, the best tombstones in the collection are still there, the heavy, hardscape monuments, and the ones I crafted myself.  The overflow has been added to adorn the expanded shade section.

Two sections remain, both just as you enter the display area from the garden gate.  The first is the “real people” cemetery, with my renderings of grave markers for actual historical persons, like Giles Corey (pressed to death in Salem, for witchcraft), Mercy Brown (known as “the New England vampire”), Lizzie Borden (of axe-murdering fame) and Edgar Allan Poe (America’s first horror writer).  Not much has been altered here, except to add a large tombstone to the rear, bracketed by a pair of figures, a Reaper and a skeleton, to populate this previously barren scene.

The other scene is Dead Lovers Lane, presided over by a banshee-type figure I term “the Spirit of Carnality.”  Here a pair of flesh-challenged couples are nevertheless pantomiming some pleasures of the flesh, complete with a skeletal Peeping Tom spying on the action.  This area also features the bat display, with several dozen hanging from the birch.

What was a wide vista of floral loveliness just a few weeks ago, with wall-to-wall native asters in full bloom, is now a browning, desiccated landscape, mournful perhaps, but setting the perfect mood for the season.  There’s still quite a bit of color as well, as oakleaf hydrangeas, chokeberries, magnolias and dogwoods wait to shed their final brilliant leaves, and the Dawn Redwood shimmers in its cinnamon tones before it defoliates.  Even the Norway maple is cooperating, beginning to turn its stunning golden shade, several weeks earlier than usual, thanks to a few frosty nights of late.

Welcome to Spooky Season here at the homestead – thrills and chills await!