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There is a ceramic pumpkin on my porch railing with a hairline crack running from the stem down one side, glued back together so many autumns ago that I could not tell you anymore whether the crack happened from a fall or from being packed too tightly in a box year after year. It still gets set out every October, crack facing the wall so it is less visible from the street.
Halloween in my house is not much of a decorating occasion compared to some of the houses on my street, but it has its own small rituals that have not changed in years, all of them centered on that porch.
Setting up before dark
I move a chair out to the porch in the late afternoon, along with a small folding table for the candy bowl, and I light the pumpkin lanterns my husband carves each year, always after dinner the night before rather than the morning of, because a carved pumpkin left out too long starts to sag and I have learned to time it carefully.
The porch light goes on the moment I set the chair out, well before it is fully dark, because I would rather have it on too early than have a trick or treater walk past thinking we are not participating. That happened once, years ago, before I understood how much people rely on that light to know which houses to approach, and I have never made the same mistake twice.
Who answers the door
I sit on the porch itself rather than answer the door from inside, candy bowl on my lap, because I like watching the costumes come up the front walk from a distance rather than only seeing them for the few seconds they stand at the threshold. My husband used to answer the door in years past, but somewhere along the way that job became mine, and I do not mind it.
The dog gets shut in the back bedroom for the evening. That decision came after one Halloween when he got out the front door chasing a costume he did not recognize as a child, and it took twenty minutes and half the block to get him back inside.
A porch on Halloween night is really just a chair, a light, and someone willing to sit still for a few hours. Everything else is decoration.
What actually gets decorated
Beyond the cracked pumpkin and the carved lanterns, I keep decorations light. A few paper bats taped in the front window, put up by whichever grandchild is visiting that particular October, and a length of orange lights strung along the porch railing that I wind on the same day every year, usually the Saturday closest to the fifteenth.
I do not do the elaborate yard displays some of my neighbors put together, the fog machines and the life sized figures. Part of that is simple preference. Part of it is that I only want to manage what fits comfortably on one porch, set up and taken down by one or two people in an afternoon rather than a whole weekend project.
After the last trick or treater
By eight thirty most years, the street goes quiet, and I bring the candy bowl inside along with whatever is left in it, which my husband and I spend the following week quietly working through despite neither of us admitting to it. The porch chair comes in that same night. The carved lanterns stay out a few more days, sagging a little more each morning, until they finally get carried to the compost pile before they collapse entirely on their own.
Taking the season down
The orange lights come off the railing within a few days, wound back around the same cardboard spool they live on the rest of the year. The paper bats stay in the window a little longer, sometimes into the following week, mostly because nobody remembers to take them down until someone mentions it.
The ceramic pumpkin is the last thing to come off the porch, and it goes back into its box wrapped in the same piece of felt it has been wrapped in for years, crack facing up so I remember which side to hide next October. By the first week of November the porch looks like it does the rest of the year, bare railing, ordinary light, waiting for whatever comes next on the calendar, which in my house is never far off.
The candy that never gets planned right
I have never once guessed the right amount of candy to buy. Some years the bowl runs empty by seven thirty and I am turning the porch light off early, apologizing to a group of pirates and princesses who came up the walk too late. Other years I am still handing out fistfuls to the last few stragglers at nine, trying to empty the bowl before I bring it inside. I keep meaning to track the count from year to year so I can plan better. I never do, and somehow the not knowing has become part of the evening too.
