My mother-in-law, Diane, has strong opinions about many things: my cooking, my parenting, the colour of our front door. But last week she reached a new peak. She called my husband and told him to take down our Halloween decorations because they were “inappropriate for the street.”
Diane lives forty minutes away. She does not live in our house. She does not live on our street. She drove past once, saw our inflatable ghost, and decided the whole thing had to go.
Let me describe the decorations, so you understand the scale of the crime. One inflatable ghost — three feet tall, says BOO on its tummy, bought in a 2023 clearance sale and still going strong. Two pumpkins on the steps, carved by my kids into the traditional triangle-eyes-and-grin design. A string of orange lights along the porch that my husband has already had to untangle twice. That’s it. The most PG Halloween display in the county. Our neighbours have a twelve-foot skeleton named Gerald, and across the road the Hendersons have turned their entire front garden into a graveyard with a fog machine that sets off their car alarm every night.
My husband, bless him, is a peacekeeper. He actually started deflating the ghost before I got home. I reinflated it before dinner. We now have what I can only describe as a ghost-related cold war, where the inflatable is somehow a proxy for eight years of boundary negotiations.
So Diane did what Diane does: she escalated. She posted in the family WhatsApp group that Halloween was “a celebration of darkness” and that “some of us have standards.” My sister-in-law replied with a pumpkin emoji. My brother-in-law replied with seven pumpkin emojis. My mother-in-law replied to that with a voice note, which nobody has listened to, because some mysteries are better left unsolved.
Then Diane called me directly. She said — and I quote — “You are making this family look cheap.” I said, “Diane, the ghost is three feet tall and it says BOO on its tummy. The only thing it threatens is boredom.”
There was a long silence. Then she said, “Your husband will deal with this.” And hung up.
Here is the part that surprised me. My husband sat me down that night and said, “I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m done refereeing. The ghost stays. The pumpkins stay. Mum can visit on November 1st if she wants.”
I nearly cried. Not because of the ghost — because in eight years of marriage, that was the first time he drew the line for us instead of asking me to be the flexible one.
Diane came for Sunday dinner yesterday. She walked past the ghost without a word. At the table, she complimented my roast potatoes. I consider that a full surrender.
To anyone with a Diane in their life: the decorations were never the point. The point was whether your house gets to be yours. Ours does now. The ghost, by the way, is staying up until November 2nd. His name is Reginald.
If I’m honest, I owe Diane a strange kind of thanks. Her overreach forced a conversation my husband and I had been dodging for years — about where his loyalty sits when his mother and his wife disagree. It turned out it sits with us. With our slightly crooked pumpkins and our tangled orange lights and our clearance-sale ghost named Reginald. I hope Diane finds something to be happy about this Halloween. We’ll be out here, waving from the porch, standards fully intact.