While we were out today, I ran by The Party Store to pick up some tissue paper in a specific color for a project I'm working on. Walking into the store, with my very young daughters in hand, I suddenly felt my stomach twist into an uncomfortable emotional knot that I recognized from the same experience last year. Really, I should have just turned and walked right out, but having searched several other places beforehand for a simple pack of orange tissue paper, I decided to just grab it and go as quickly as possible.
The grotesque and disturbing Halloween displays are one thing to me, and quite another to my impressionable and sensitive young girls, I'm sure. And, it would be one thing if it were contained to the costume section, so that I could avoid it if I choose, but from the very front door and cascading down every isle from wedding items, princess birthday supplies, and disposable tableware, we were confronted with hideous, evil-eyed skeletons hanging menacingly above us to garish displays of dead, bleeding figures hung upside down by their tightly spun spider webs - not to mention the creepy, animated horrors of the actual Halloween section which we tried hard to avoid but were nearly forced to walk into to get to the rest of the store.
Now, I'm really not trying to bash The Party Store, as most of the year, I find it a colorful host to friendly festivity... but I have felt terrible now for two years in a row upon walking in there unsuspectingly and exposing my daughters to visions of terror, and I am making a promise to never set foot in there again in Sept-Oct. Honestly, it is a bit much even for me and I don't want to have to look at that junk either.
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