Am I correct in interpreting the last paragraph as saying that you stopped doing this once you moved to the South?
Or had stopped at some point before that, I guess.
2: Yes. We stopped before moving, but not related to moving, if that makes any sense.
That doesn't sound like an unusual Halloween decoration to me. Unless the hanged person looked like an African-American sharecropper.
3: In that case, I agree with Ned that this doesn't sound at all beyond the pale as a Halloween decoration. I don't recall any specific examples, but I'm sure I've seen some decorations like that over the years, and provided the hanged person isn't portrayed in an explicitly racist way I doubt most people would even think of the lynching connection, at least outside of the South.
I recall seeing hanged ghosts, usually as part of a bat, pumpkin, etc, ensemble, but not hanged scarecrows or more realistic effigies.
We always put out hanged effigies, but they were always South Asian.
I don't want to encourage your punning, Stanley, but that's a clever post title.
In other Halloween news, a friend's 6-year-old daughter is going as a Viking fairy. A Viking fairy! She originally wanted to be a Viking fairy geisha, but decided to keep it simple.
I don't think I would have made the connection if you hadn't made it for me, Stanley, and I've definitely seen lots of hanging ghosts. It's a common form of suicide, and ghosts are frequently supposed to be suicides, I thought.
yeah - lots of people have hanged themselves or been hung in non-lynching circumstances. i agree with above commentators that as long as your dummy isn't noticeably black and you don't live in an area where that kind of thing happened a lot, you're not outside the territory of ordinary macabre yard decorations. i tend to find macabre yard decorations disturbing anyway, but that's just me.
That's nothing. I actually produced and starred in a freaking minstrel show in high school. With slapstick. And blackface. (In our defense, it was for a Victorian Studies unit in AP History. Yes, I'm aware that isn't much of a defense.) To this day, I still cannot believe that absolutely no one raised a single objection. Every few months I'm reminded of that and can't stop wincing for several minutes.
9: Apparently a friend one of my kids (college age) found something like 17 Batman costumes on remainder, so they will be running around as a small Batman army. I'm generally a veritable Scrooge when it come to costumes on any one over the age of 12, but that does sound kind of fun.
Friends of mine live in a spooky old Victorian in Altadena. They do it up beautifully on Halloween. Their decoration include hands coming up out of graves and remains scattered around a pentagram sacrifice site. The centerpiece is a stunt noose, rigged up with a harness to allow people to simulate their own hangings. It is really fun to see a 12-year-old girl drop from a tree branch and giggle hysterically while she swings from a rope.
Your teacher must have been either oblivious or trying to get fired.
15: Or trying to recruit the newest Grand Dragon.
8: I don't want to encourage your punning, Stanley, but that's a clever post title.
Q: What's the difference between Stanley and Stanley?
A: One's a punning runner while the other's a running punner.
13 is awesome, but of course I would say that.
And is Stanley a Ghostbusters comics fan?
14 reminds me of another reason hanging dummies were a popular halloween decoration in my youth: Heathers. Right along with (empty) bottles of draino and Perrier.
This guy knows how to do Halloween yard decorations.
Our little trick-or-treater ("ladybug fairy" costume but I think we'll just say ladybug since wtf?) just woke up after sleeping 8 hours and is now letting my partner rock her back to sleep. This is the first time she's cried since awe picked her up and threw all her stuff in the trunk yesterday afternoon. I expect today to have some more sadness, but I hope we can manage some of the delight that highlighted our first day together.
23 "awe" s/b "we" but please cut me a little slack on having "aww" as consistent mental subtext right now.
Last night I was approached by a zombie talking on a BlackBerry and randomly invited to a party. I thought of accepting and going as the sci-fi hero who has to maintain some semblance of normality while the zombies rampage, but then realised that if I was meant to fix the water supply and the electricity grid and restore constitutional democracy I'd better get a good night's sleep.
Our little trick-or-treater
That does sound much nicer than "asshole".
23: Aw/awe! Have you guys decided what you're going to be called? In foster-to-adoption cases, does one avoid the Mama/Mommy variants at first, or pick something else altogether and run with that the whole time? If this is too nosy/ignorant, ignore me!
27: Indeed, I'm practicing avoiding bad language in front of little assholes. She's picked up "Oh my gosh!" and it's adorable but we want to focus our additions to her vocabulary in other arenas.
Oud, that's largely age-based. She called her last foster mom Mommy and we expect she'll default to that with us, too. Right now we're saying Mama Thorn and Mommy Lee, but neither of us has a preference about what she ends up calling us. She's so small that anyone doing mom-type jobs would probably be called a mom-type name. With older kids, we never pushed for titles because it seemed artificial, but other families do.
I'm finally grateful for the ipad, which lets me easily type one-handed while rocking the little sleeper. I should be getting up to start breakfast, but I don't want to risk waking her. Seriously, the fact that she's a snuggly child makes this all a million times easier, though I have to be vigilant with the physical therapy exercises for my back now that I'm going to be lifting 40-lb weight all day every day.
She's picked up "Oh my gosh!"
My little ones will very seriously intone "M. O. G.", which remains too funny to correct.
No, correct it! Correct it to "M.O.P."!
thorn, I'm just so excited for you and lee, it sounds like a incredible (difficult?) experience and you are giving a child the chance to have wonderful, loving parents. they should all be so lucky. I am thinking of you a lot and pulling for you from afar.
touching on wood a thousand times to indicate the total non-relatedness of this story, but I just learned tonight that our maid also had a daughter (in addition to her two sons) who died at age 5 of meningitis. she would have been 12 now. I didn't want to probe but it seems as if she might have lived if they could have afforded better care. I can only imagine how that multiplied her anxiety when her son was injured. I'm really glad we could pay for his stay in intensive care and all, but the idea of this other child dying just for want of money is so awful and sad. I kind of feel like the world sucks.
Wow, that does suck. I thought Narnia's health system had at least a couple of backstops, but on the other hand Republicans love it.
33, 34: Am I remembering correctly that this wouldn't have been in Narnia?
I thought it was the islands of Phillip.
