Halloween decorating has quietly become a lot of work for very little reaction:
You spend a weekend on something that reads as static.
Cobwebs on the hedge, a skeleton in the flowerbed, pumpkins on the step. It takes hours, it costs a few hundred over the years, and from the pavement it's a still image. Kids glance at it and keep moving toward the house with the good stuff.
The storage is worse than the setup.
Inflatables that need a whole tub. Foam headstones that crack. Fairy lights that come out knotted every single October. A garage shelf permanently surrendered to one night of the year.
Weather ruins it on the one night it matters.
Wind flattens the inflatable. Rain gets into the light-up props. You reset the whole front garden on the 30th and wake up on the 31st to find half of it face-down on the grass.
Everything you buy is dead on the 1st of November.
That's the real cost. A hundred dollars of decorations that do nothing at all for the next eleven months, then come out slightly more faded next year.
It isn't that your decorations aren't good enough.
It's that the biggest blank surface on the front of your house — the window everyone already walks past — has never had anything on it.