Hilarious Halloween decoration (not)

A number of people in the town of Greeneville, Tennessee called the police last week to report what appeared to be a man crushed by his own garage door. It turned out to be a harmless Halloween decoration.

Americans go to great lengths to decorate their houses, gardens and themselves at Halloween. Indeed, encouraged by retailers, who begin stocking their shelves with Halloween-related products more or less the morning after the Labor Day weekend, Americans spent more than $8 billion on this “holiday” last year. And they are predicted to spend $9.1 billion on it in 2017.

I like American-style Halloween, I really do. It is a mostly fun event at a mostly dreary time of year, and one we enthusiastically joined in with every year during our expatriation. But inevitably, some people take it too far. As in this case. Why? Because Halloween is on the 31^st of October. You can therefore expect to find fake gravestones strewn across gardens, cobweb-draped houses, zombie-like hands reaching up out of lawns and signs warning you about the presence of ghosts, witches and the like towards the end of October. But not in MID-SEPTEMBER!

So is it any surprise that people walking or (more likely) driving past what looked like scene of a horrific accident almost six weeks before Halloween should be alarmed enough to phone the police?

The local cops don’t seem to think so. Rather than cautioning people to restrict their ghoulish activities to around the actual time of the event, they simply published a photo of the grizzly lifelike prank on their Facebook page along with the warning: “Do NOT call 911 reporting a dead body. Instead, congratulate the homeowner on a great display.”

Well ha fucking ha. I know that people in the US have long started putting up their Christmas decorations in early December, some even being so bold as to do so before the previous “holiday” – Thanksgiving – in late November. But this is a step too far.

It’s patently obvious that a blow-up Santa by your front door or a string of fairy lights heralds the onset of what our American cousins euphemistically call “the festive season.” A doll made up to look like a horribly mangled body, complete with what appear to be bloody handprints on a garage door, is not so obviously a joke related to an event in the relatively distant future.