Holiday Decorations It getting to the time where people decorate the outsides of their houses for the different holidays which are coming. Some people spend elaborate sums of money on their decorations and use copious amounts of electricity to power them. Once the decorations are purchased they own them and they can use them every year, but the electrical use is another problem and usually goes on for days before and after the holiday and depending where you live it can cost quite a pretty penny. When I lived in the city as a child no one ever decorated anything when they lived in apartments except for the occasional picture of Santa hung on a door at Christmas or a wreath. Those who were lucky enough to own their own homes in the area might have put out a small decoration or two at Christmas, but it didn’t usually involve the use of electricity. We lived in Brooklyn and were poor people, but so was most of the other people in the neighborhood. If a kid owned a two-wheeler bike it was considered a very big deal. The funny part of it was no one in my day ever celebrated Halloween in the area of Brooklyn I lived in. I tell this to people and they can’t believe it. Whenever I say this I am usually asked what we did celebrate and I mystify them even more when I say it was Thanksgiving. When I was a child kids would dress in homemade costumes and go around to the stores and ask the big question which was, “Do you have anything for Thanksgiving?” Usually the store owner would give you a couple of pieces of penny candy if it was a candy store, but it seemed like every store owner would contribute something to the sack we carried around with us. I usually dressed like a bum. My mother would burn the end of a cork and rub it on my face and I would wear old clothes which were really beat up. Actually, considering the hard times, the store owners were quite generous. This has nothing to do with holidays, but people can’t believe it when I tell them I never saw a pizza until I moved to Queens. There were no pizza parlors in my area and I had no idea what a pizza was until I was about 12 years old.
I remember one very elaborate Halloween display which a person in my neighborhood put out every year. I haven’t seen it lately so I assume that person either moved, got tired of all the work or it no longer with us. He had the greatest mannequins. He would put out about thirty different characters from horror movies. He had Freddy Krueger, Frankenstein’s monster and Imhotep the mummy among other creatures. When I drove past it one day I just had to stop my car. There was Dracula staring at me from behind a chain link fence and he was surrounded by just about every monster I could think of. The creature from the Black Lagoon was nearby with its chilling gaze and with an army of zombies for support. In the back of the group was a sort of skeletal monster, it was Pumpkinhead. When I was a child I remember being about 5 years old and I was taken to a movie where a prehistoric man was being thawed from a bed of ice. It scared the heck out of me when he came alive, but that was the last time I was ever scared by a horror movie. As strange as this sounds you could see this display was a labor of love. While Halloween displays are getting more popular, they still don’t compare in number to Christmas displays. Christmas displays are everywhere at holiday time. There is a house which has its lawn completely festooned with elves, sleighs, wooden soldiers and all sorts of other decorations which is not far from mine. There are just thousands of dollars’ worth of decorations and a good portion of them are action displays. The display is so vast it prompted newspaper photographers to come by and take photos for the local newspaper. I remember thinking how incredible it was and since we live in a very high rate electrical area, I knew this must have cost a fortune to run. Even more incredible was the fact the homeowner would have to take days to put it up and would set it up just before December and not take it down to at least half way through January of the next year. Sometimes there would be a crowd of people in front of his house showing their kids the display, to the delight of both the children and homeowner. I think this was really the purpose of the display, to amaze the children. I can only imagine what people from my old neighborhood would have thought of people who put out a tremendous display for a holiday. They would have thought they were either very rich or crazy. Even businesses didn’t do that, but I can understand why. Most small businesses were just scraping along themselves. I guess there could have been a reason they couldn’t even if they could have afforded it. The reason was they didn’t have the electrical capabilities to support such a display. The stores had a few light and a couple of outlets, but nothing like people have today. Electrical use was nothing like it is now. I have witnessed great changes in my life. When I was born life was simple. Cars were stick shift and if you wanted a car with a radio, heater or defroster you paid extra, because it was a luxury. There was no television to speak of, especially in my neighborhood. Kids went out to play and they had a great time. Most people were in the same boat so they helped each other out with things like rent parties, where everyone chipped in to help someone out who had no money to pay their rent when it was due. If you went on welfare, a worker would watch you and periodically examine the bag of groceries you bought and if there was cake in it, you could be taken off welfare. You can see how in an atmosphere like this no one had the funds for fancy decorating for the holidays. |
