Halloween Decoy Decorating Begins

We got the LED C9 light stringers up on the house today because it was in the mid 60s and dry out. We also put up the plastic Frankenstein's Monster decoration we got from Target last year and in the process discovered we had also purchased purple and green LED mini lights from Target last year as well for this year. We had forgotten all about them until we discovered the box of lights in our outdoor lighting supplies tote in the basement this morning. We thought we were going to skip putting up lights and garland around the door this year, so now we have to go out and purchase some appropriate black foliage Halloween vines for around the door to cover up the light wires. That's the problem when you curate Halloween props and decorations years in advance, you forget what you have! Next week we will put out our 8' inflatable Frankenstein's Monster decoration on our front paver terrace. We call these our "decoy decorations" because we only start to set up our Halloween yard haunt just before Halloween. Years ago, we sometimes literally set up the haunt the morning of Halloween. We like the haunt to be a surprise for the trick-or-treaters on Halloween, but we also get some nasty weather during the course of October that would be detrimental to our props with extended exposure to the elements. However, we eventually realized that our haunt set up tradition could have a negative effect in terms of trick-or-treater turnout on Halloween night because we were a house of "Halloween Scrooges", so we started putting up pre-haunt "decoy" decorations along with our house light stringers (which primarily serve as ambient lighting for our haunt) when spooky season decorating begins. This way we're advertising that we're still around and that this is a house to come visit on Halloween. We also are now trying to foreshadow what the current year's haunt theme will be with the decoy decorations we put out. Also the decoy decorations are intended to be "tame" in comparison to what the actual Halloween haunt will look like.