Is it just Arlo wanting to get gripey about the work that goes into Halloween? But how does he come up with Easter for the contrasting example?
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Easter doesn’t traditionally, as far as I am aware, at least here in the UK, require as much decoration, dressing up and general fuss as Christmas or Halloween, or the moving of heavy objects like trees and pumpkins. Just the purchase and eating of chocolate eggs. Also, in the Northern Hemisphere it is likely to be lighter and warmer. So I imagine that is all there is.
Why Easter for contrast?
Because eggs are small and easily transported compared to pumpkins
Big/small, hide/Display, role reversals which go on and on . . . After all, an Arlo
Easter decorations don’t involve picking up and carrying heavy things. Halloween has pumpkins (the bigger, the more festive) and hay bales.
@narmitaj – before Easter, the chicken eggs are hard boiled. Then the eggs are decorated by the children, and a parent or older child for teaching. Most of everyone I knew dyed the eggs with kits that included several colors of dye packets (which we mix with vinegar), a wire egg dipper, and at least 1 clear crayon that would prevent the dye from coloring the egg shell under it so that there could be shapes, messages, and layered colors. In our house, about 12 to 24 eggs were prepared. After the multicolored eggs were done and in the fridge, and the kids in bed, sometime in the middle of the night, the elder residents hid the eggs throughout the house, and placed a few in prepared woven Easter baskets which included a bed of grass, (real or green paper shred,) and (here it comes) the chocolate eggs and bunnies.
Then, In the morning each child would awaken and rise to find their easter basket left by the Easter Bunny. When everyone was up, there would be an Easter egg hunt throughout the house, the decorated eggs having been found and hidden by the Easter bunny. (one learns to keep track of the number of eggs created; I found a black scary thing behind a picture on a shelf once, several months after.)
The lifetime benefit of this, if any, in the sand mandala sense, is that , to eat their eggs, the kids have to break the designs on them (not all on Easter, of course).
Once or twice, my family tried to dye hollow eggs by putting small holes in the top & bottom then blowing out the raw egg. A few of these worked. As a parent, I stuck to creating treasure hunts with plastic eggs each holding a piece of chocolate & a clue to the next one.
Most fun with a pumpkin was when I picked a huge one from the outside display at the grocery store. The cashier, a woman over 50 and under 5 feet tall, didn’t believe the price. She hustled the monster out to the display, saw that it was right, and scooted back with it.
Exterior decorating for Easter is usually lower key, too: perhaps a few flags or banners and some pots or baskets of flowers. All much easier to transport and the flowers can stay on display all spring. Of course, Arlo can also gripe that Halloween doesn’t offer an opportunity for “a peek”!
FYI, the mom of one of my students told me that if I didn’t want the squirrels to eat the pumpkins (or seeds) I can spray the outside of the pumpkin with, of all things, AquaNet Hairspray. I haven’t tried it, nor do I know of anyone who has, but I offer it for what it’s worth.
Some people go all-out decorating for Halloween. I passed by some really elaborate tableaux a week or two ago, with various manikins or dummies in costume, complete with props. One house even involved their pickup truck and a motor bike in their front-yard extravaganza.
Easter is a funny one. I have pictures I took in the early 1990s of trees around town festooned with hanging colored eggs (presumably plastic). Paper decorations were also posted in windows and on doors. Halloween pumpkins are presumably heavier and bulkier to lug around, but in the end they’re not really very heavy. I think Arlo is musing that Janis is taking too long to decide.
I don’t pay much attention to Easter. I did when I was a little kid, with the candy and all, and I did when I was a church music director, although Palm Sunday was the bigger deal with the cantata and all. But now Easter is just another Sunday.
I pay only a little attention to Halloween. I buy a big bag of Hershey’s Miniatures in case we get any kids and then turn off all the lights so we don’t.
As a kid my mom would let us dye hard boiled eggs for Easter. One or another one of them would end up as the egg on the seder plate.
I actually prefer just about any other day of the year to Halloween. You see I feel that Halloween is the second worst day of the year for a birthday (Leap year day I figure is worse). I would have done just about anything to not have Halloween decorations (though they were much less back then) in the house. I never had a normal birthday – often the entertainment for the party was going out Trick or Treating. Cake every year was orange, chocolate frosting, plastic fence, fuzzy cat, plastic pumpkin, cardboard witch. (Robert did not believe me until we were cleaning out my stuff from the family house when mom had to move to assisted living a few years ago and we came across a bag filled with a bunch of cardboard witches.)
For a while, my youngest sister was doing a big Easter dinner with us and her in-laws. With covids and some medical and family issues she hasn’t done that in a few years.
“I think Arlo is musing that Janis is taking too long to decide.”
Not so much “taking too long”, too much changing her mind. She’s got him arranging and rearranging the gourd collection, and the big one wound up not even in the display (It’s back by the car at the end.) If you didn’t want the big one in the display, Janis, why’d you make Arlo get it out of the car? Or for that matter, put it IN the car at the store?
Twenty-five years ago the hottest Halloween decoration was a witch having crashed with her broom into a tree. Every town had one somewhere. This year the hottest Halloween decoration seems to be a $200 nine-foot tall animatronic werewolf from Home Depot. Awww, who’s a good boy?
There are the Sally Forth werewolf statues, but those weren’t strictly Halloween.
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Easter doesn’t traditionally, as far as I am aware, at least here in the UK, require as much decoration, dressing up and general fuss as Christmas or Halloween, or the moving of heavy objects like trees and pumpkins. Just the purchase and eating of chocolate eggs. Also, in the Northern Hemisphere it is likely to be lighter and warmer. So I imagine that is all there is.
Why Easter for contrast?
Because eggs are small and easily transported compared to pumpkins
Big/small, hide/Display, role reversals which go on and on . . . After all, an Arlo
Easter decorations don’t involve picking up and carrying heavy things. Halloween has pumpkins (the bigger, the more festive) and hay bales.
@narmitaj – before Easter, the chicken eggs are hard boiled. Then the eggs are decorated by the children, and a parent or older child for teaching. Most of everyone I knew dyed the eggs with kits that included several colors of dye packets (which we mix with vinegar), a wire egg dipper, and at least 1 clear crayon that would prevent the dye from coloring the egg shell under it so that there could be shapes, messages, and layered colors. In our house, about 12 to 24 eggs were prepared. After the multicolored eggs were done and in the fridge, and the kids in bed, sometime in the middle of the night, the elder residents hid the eggs throughout the house, and placed a few in prepared woven Easter baskets which included a bed of grass, (real or green paper shred,) and (here it comes) the chocolate eggs and bunnies.
Then, In the morning each child would awaken and rise to find their easter basket left by the Easter Bunny. When everyone was up, there would be an Easter egg hunt throughout the house, the decorated eggs having been found and hidden by the Easter bunny. (one learns to keep track of the number of eggs created; I found a black scary thing behind a picture on a shelf once, several months after.)
The lifetime benefit of this, if any, in the sand mandala sense, is that , to eat their eggs, the kids have to break the designs on them (not all on Easter, of course).
Once or twice, my family tried to dye hollow eggs by putting small holes in the top & bottom then blowing out the raw egg. A few of these worked. As a parent, I stuck to creating treasure hunts with plastic eggs each holding a piece of chocolate & a clue to the next one.
Most fun with a pumpkin was when I picked a huge one from the outside display at the grocery store. The cashier, a woman over 50 and under 5 feet tall, didn’t believe the price. She hustled the monster out to the display, saw that it was right, and scooted back with it.
Exterior decorating for Easter is usually lower key, too: perhaps a few flags or banners and some pots or baskets of flowers. All much easier to transport and the flowers can stay on display all spring. Of course, Arlo can also gripe that Halloween doesn’t offer an opportunity for “a peek”!
https://www.arloandjanis.com/apeek.htm
FYI, the mom of one of my students told me that if I didn’t want the squirrels to eat the pumpkins (or seeds) I can spray the outside of the pumpkin with, of all things, AquaNet Hairspray. I haven’t tried it, nor do I know of anyone who has, but I offer it for what it’s worth.
Some people go all-out decorating for Halloween. I passed by some really elaborate tableaux a week or two ago, with various manikins or dummies in costume, complete with props. One house even involved their pickup truck and a motor bike in their front-yard extravaganza.
Easter is a funny one. I have pictures I took in the early 1990s of trees around town festooned with hanging colored eggs (presumably plastic). Paper decorations were also posted in windows and on doors. Halloween pumpkins are presumably heavier and bulkier to lug around, but in the end they’re not really very heavy. I think Arlo is musing that Janis is taking too long to decide.
I don’t pay much attention to Easter. I did when I was a little kid, with the candy and all, and I did when I was a church music director, although Palm Sunday was the bigger deal with the cantata and all. But now Easter is just another Sunday.
I pay only a little attention to Halloween. I buy a big bag of Hershey’s Miniatures in case we get any kids and then turn off all the lights so we don’t.
As a kid my mom would let us dye hard boiled eggs for Easter. One or another one of them would end up as the egg on the seder plate.
I actually prefer just about any other day of the year to Halloween. You see I feel that Halloween is the second worst day of the year for a birthday (Leap year day I figure is worse). I would have done just about anything to not have Halloween decorations (though they were much less back then) in the house. I never had a normal birthday – often the entertainment for the party was going out Trick or Treating. Cake every year was orange, chocolate frosting, plastic fence, fuzzy cat, plastic pumpkin, cardboard witch. (Robert did not believe me until we were cleaning out my stuff from the family house when mom had to move to assisted living a few years ago and we came across a bag filled with a bunch of cardboard witches.)
For a while, my youngest sister was doing a big Easter dinner with us and her in-laws. With covids and some medical and family issues she hasn’t done that in a few years.
“I think Arlo is musing that Janis is taking too long to decide.”
Not so much “taking too long”, too much changing her mind. She’s got him arranging and rearranging the gourd collection, and the big one wound up not even in the display (It’s back by the car at the end.) If you didn’t want the big one in the display, Janis, why’d you make Arlo get it out of the car? Or for that matter, put it IN the car at the store?
Twenty-five years ago the hottest Halloween decoration was a witch having crashed with her broom into a tree. Every town had one somewhere. This year the hottest Halloween decoration seems to be a $200 nine-foot tall animatronic werewolf from Home Depot. Awww, who’s a good boy?
There are the Sally Forth werewolf statues, but those weren’t strictly Halloween.
Although there were still up then:
https://v7.comicskingdom.net/comics/sally-forth/2018-10-27/?widgetId=570
Well, I hope Marciuliano and Keefe got royalties from Home Depot for the werewolf idea.