Hallow'en

Thud! Thud! Trik or treeeeet... trik or treeeeeet!!

If any of this was meant to scare me let me explain what my response was... I tried to stop stuffing my face and jumped over the sofa arm and grabbed the candy basket all at once and all in such a rush because I was afraid - afraid that the little monsters will pass by my door on the 24th floor and not stop for all the candy I had prepared! :)

Ah! Hallow'en... all the Enid Blytonesque fancies coming alive... for my first Hallow'en as a respectable US resident. (My first one in Buffalo doesn't count cos I was just a poor student, living in student dwellings in a street where only students lived and Hallow'en celebration was all about getting drunk and hitting on scantily clad women on the college bus. I didn't live in a dorm, so I was spared the cultural shock of "experimentation" of American college youth! :) ) So well, an apartment poses a challenge to the creative mind or to a mind with the lack thereof. How does one decorate the only piece of your dwelling that strangers passing by will see... the door? You can't quite decorate the threshold without someone tripping over it and causing a fire in the narrow and well lit hallway - as Murphy watching over the person's progress will ensure! But one must do one's duty as a respectable apartment resident and not cause fires. So yes, that leaves only the door then.

Hm.

~Scratch Scratch~ (that was my head)

Oh well, d-uh! New-age technology means I have access to a printer! And borrowing other people's graphic ideas off of the web is no trouble at all - except for the very small pinch of guilt. So that's what I did... I printed all the images I could find and fit on my door, cut them out of the sheets of paper and pasted them on my door! Novel, isn't it :)

Well, what can I say... it worked!

It being Diwali and all that, I decided I had to do up the room a little bit too... So I dimmed the lights, put some tea-lights in the window sill in mismatched tea-light holders, put one in a special Hallow'en lantern that I bought on my way back from work, and put that and a little scarecrow figurine on a stool covered with a red pillow-cover right by the threshold, enough distance away from the door that I could open it all the way and share the display with the trick-or-treaters! Honestly, I just wanted to show off the view from my apartment in a subtle and indirect way. I tried everything except road construction signs to point in the direction of our little bay window (by whose window-sill stood the mismatched tea-light holders!!)

...but the first kid to stop by the door called my bluff. He crossed the threshold and peered at the lumbering view of the downtown, grabbed a handful of candy and wandered into the kitchen area to sniff out some more!Avarice in its purest and most innocent form!! Soon more little fairies blessed our home. Little angels grabbed and stared with mouths open at the big candy basket. Calculating little twerps, doing the simple logistical math and running route-tracking algorithms in their cute little heads - "hmm... it takes five minutes to go back home and empty my basket, five minutes plus two to get to the next door... but wait, mamma's expression says she won't be too happy; ok so I can grab about two fistfuls, still have room for two more at the next door and..." on and on, experiencing heady green monster of an emotion for the first time - we all live it but are too superficial to admit it- greed! Little boys , little girls - (fairies, bumble-bees, the beagle boys, lady bugs, ballerinas) staring at the wrapped splendour in red, green, yellow shining paper...

How did I profit from this endeavour? Well, I got a free valuation of my property from the best critics of course!

(c) VedicVerses