53R1A75

Spring-Ford Reporter:

To the Editor:

Halloween. I like it. Lot’s of people like it. There’s much to do with Halloween. From decorations and cooking to costumes and candy, people busy themselves with preparing much for the merrymaking involved with the holiday. Decorations have always been a great way to communicate the holiday spirit. But to my recollection, the decorations of Halloween never rivaled the intensity of Christmas decorations, that is, until recently.

Houses and store windows alike are now full of pumpkins and gravestones, ghouls and monsters alike. They draw the attention of the passer-by and capture the imagination of children seeking out their Halloween treasures of candy. One particular store had windows that absolutely blew my mind to pieces. After a pleasant night of said Halloween Merrymaking, a small group of my friends and I decided to have our own Halloween parade along the sidewalk of Main St. in Royersford. During that walk we passed a store that many of us had passed countless times before without much scrutiny. Its windows are usually decorated in concert with the season and are always pleasant to look at in passing by. But this night my friends and I were intent on finding entertainment and so, I was surprised at the gravity with which this store’s windows held our attentions and our wondrous amazement.

Not that many store’s don’t make windows worth examining, but to me I think there was something more, something that made these windows worth more than just examination, something that made these windows special. Something so quotidian to the daily by-passer, but so sublime when one slowed the pace of their life to really take in the artful arrangement that actually spoke with such a beautifully haunting narrative. Windows done well will always have a narration, but windows that narrate with a voice that has no other purpose than to whisper the haunting prose of the artist’s visual memory have the ability to enslave the viewer’s mind’s eye and wholly capture their imagination.

But how could such a simple and everyday window arranged with simple and everyday objects be arranged for a holiday to speak with such a voice? I would say that this is an example of the idea that the sum of the parts will always have a greater effect that the parts themselves. With dolls and chests and lace, ghosts and ghouls and picture frames, the obvious elements simply looked like Halloween. But with more examination the details became the basis of the haunt. Dolls that hid in a chest beside an over-sized hand and seemed to be peeking out on a world that was totally foreign to them. A ballerina on point refused to face her audience. Perhaps she was in the middle of a spin, but most seemingly, she was not interested in her audience or she had something to hide. Faces of famous people like Michael Jackson painted in gaudy exaggerations of facial color then framed as if they were the masterpiece – stared out into the window scene. At the center, a woman whose face was unspeakably rotted was comforted by a headless husband as she sat silently on her rocking chair. But behind it all was the orchestrator of the scene. It was the silent partner that stared straight into your soul, but could not be found. And when you did find that head hidden in the far back corner of the scene, you spent all your energy not to reel away in complete terror at what you had found.