I can remember Halloween as a kid. We put a jack o’lantern on the front porch, cut a couple of eyeholes in a sheet, threw it over our heads, and went out to badger people for candy to fill our K-Mart plastic pumpkins.

When my own kids were young, we might have gone a little further: buying greasepaint or plastic fangs at Target, and maybe spraying some fake cobwebs on the porch.

One year, I bought some old clothes from Goodwill, and stuffed them to make a fake dead guy for the front porch. It really creeped people out–including me. Some kids refused to get close enough to our front door to trick-or-treat.That was the last year we did that craft project.

That was then. This is now. Halloween is in overdrive, folks. The Chinese can’t make plastic skeletons fast enough!

When you consider, it may be a bit sick to put fake graves on your front yard when Ebola is raging in Africa and people are (irrationally) freaking out about it here in the States. But, on the other hand, maybe it’s a coping mechanism. Death is all around us–why not invite it in for coffee on the porch?

Works for me.