Christmas is approaching, and my 3-year-old son can’t stop thinking about Halloween.  

Back in October, when the macabre decorations invaded the serene mundanity of my neighborhood, my son was instantly intrigued. The once-immaculate lawns and flowerbeds were now littered with plastic corpses, the dull, suburban houses suddenly wreathed in spiderwebs, and bulbous orange vegetables grinned at him from every corner.

The arrival of the twisted oddities frightened and fascinated him equally, as the most interesting things in life tend to. But there was one decoration in particular which really captured his attention, and terrified him beyond reason, known as the “Scary Man.”

The Scary Man was technically a woman, a witch, to be precise. It had a ghoulish face lined with sharp teeth, and sported a wide-brimmed hat which I could slowly lift to reveal “his” hideous features. My son took this particular decoration very seriously indeed, and would refuse to touch it, lest it bite his fingers or something.

But he was also completely obsessed with it, and always demanded that we walk the route that passed it by. At completely random intervals, he would express a strong desire to see it, usually when we were several miles away, at the other end of the city.  

Eventually, he began seeing it in our house. Children seem to develop a fear of the dark as soon as they have the capacity to imagine what horrors might lurk within, and he’d just been provided with a genuinely unsettling visual. Suddenly, he didn’t want to be left alone anywhere, not even for a moment. Our shadow-filled hallway was the official territory of the Scary Man, and required adult supervision to cross.

I felt kind of bad that he’d conjured a personal boogeyman at such a young age, so I attempted to lighten him up by making fun of the Scary Man, or explaining that he wasn’t “real.” But real is a difficult concept to explain to a toddler, so I made a foolish comparison to his toys, in an attempt to prove that the Scary Man had no life of his own.

That wasn’t a good idea, seeing as his favourite movie at the time was Toy Story, and the concept of sentient plastic figurines who move only when adults leave the room didn’t seem far-fetched in the slightest.

Finally, I had the idea of shooting a video of the Scary Man, with a Snapchat filter superimposed over his face, in an effort to soften his image. I chose the animated dancing turd, and shot a few seconds of it prancing over his robes. The video greatly amused my son, but the threat of the Scary Man remained untarnished.

Eventually, Halloween passed, and the decorations started to disappear. I explained brightly to my son that the Scary Man would most likely be gone forever, and was startled to see his eyes fill with tears. He was absolutely inconsolable until I reassured him that the Scary Man would return, one day. I’m still confused to how he felt about the thing.

Once the last trace of Halloween had disappeared, we went on our last pilgrimage to visit the Scary Man, in a bid to prove that he was really gone, and hopefully, erode the fear. My son stood in front of the house, staring at the empty wall with a mixture of relief and disappointment.

He still insisted on checking up on it once in awhile, just in case. Sometimes he would randomly bring the Scary Man back into conversation, speculating that our next-door neighbors had thrown him in the garbage, though I’m not entirely sure why he decided to blame them.

Eventually, the warm glow of Christmas filled our neighborhood, the soft, ethereal lights intriguing him almost as much as the zombies. I figured now was the time to explain the concept of Santa Claus, before he developed any critical-thinking skills.

At the mention of presents, he was excited, and I offered to show him a picture of the rosy-cheeked deity of capitalism. He enthusiastically agreed, and I took a moment to consider what his first impression of Santa Claus should be. Being a modern-day parent with the infinite landscape of the internet before me, I had the luxury of being able to choose any depiction of Santa I could imagine.

I decided that, as stupid as it sounds, the Coca-Cola commercials, with their hand-painted, propaganda poster Santa was actually my favorite depiction of St. Nick, and the one I felt most accurately summarized his role in society.

“This is Santa,” I said proudly, holding the phone out.

He beheld the twinkly-eyed, morbidly obese stranger in utter terror, and I suddenly realized what was going through his mind. He’d just spent a month walking through neighborhoods filled with twisted, demonic creatures, and now, I’d just told him that this grinning, bearded man was about to break into our property and deposit wrapped parcels, for reasons he couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Stuttering, I tried to explain again about the presents, but he held up a tiny hand to silence me.

“Daddy,” he said, firmly. “I don’t want that man in our house.”