Jesus mummy

I don't like halloween. I don't hate it or have some ridiculous religious aversion to it. Halloween's just the weirdest day in our culture and I haven't enjoyed it since I was a little kid.

A friend of mine, pastor Bubba, from Johnson County, TX (where rednecks were invented) recently voiced my exact feelings about it. He said something like - if a person from somewhere like Africa, or Haiti (or any other place where average people know A LOT about the dark side of the spirit world) came to visit the US and asked what Halloween was about...we'd have a hard time explaining:

"Halloween is the day we celebrate fear and death. We dress up like monsters and set our yard up to look like a cemetery and scare the hell out of each other. Then the next day we're back to normal...mocking you 3rd world people and your silly "spells" and "magic". Don't you know everything has a scientific and logical conclusion? And the only spirit is God. He lives in this here box that we've placed him in?"

I know all kinds of churches take full opportunity for massive outreach on Halloween. Or at least serve the neighborhood with some kind of carnival and games. Two years ago Agent Wife came up with a porch display for our house. She figured, "These kids want death & fear? I've got a good story about death".

So she constructs this life-size dummy of Jesus just waking up from the tomb, still in mummy clothes with blood stains. He's got this mild grin on his face that practically says, "yeh...I just defeated death...BWA-HA-HA-HA" (well, I just threw in that evil sounding laugh). The Jesus mummy is kind of scary since he's laying up on our secluded porch surrounded by bushes and you don't see him until you get right up to our door.

Agent Wife constructed a new body this year since the old body had to be thrown out when it got moldy. We use to store it under our house and I always feared hiring a plumber one day who might stumble across this body in a plastic bag.

I was happy to see that Darth Vader has made a Halloween comeback. May it be known that in both 1981 AND 1982...I was Darth Vader - way back before it was cool to be him. I had the full helmet, cape and all.

To me, Halloween is still kind of unexplainably weird. And even the Jesus mummy thing is not something I would have come up with. That's AW's gig. I doubt any of the local kids lives have changed while trick-or-treating at our house. But...I guess if you have to decorate your house in gore...

But the debut year of the Jesus mummy, one kid came up to the door and said, "cool...Osama bin laden".