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Half of Tolkien's best moments happen at a door. The Doors of Durin. Bag End's round green door. The whole point of a doormat is the threshold, and no fandom on earth has spent more time on thresholds than Middle-earth. Honestly, the doormat was basically invented for this.

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There are two Thanksgivings and every year I sell mats to both.

One of them is the good one. People you chose, food you like, somebody's dog under the table, a walk afterward. The other one is an obligation with gravy on it, and you are counting the hours from the moment you park.

I'm not going to pretend the second one doesn't exist, because half my customers are living it.

Every year around November 2, the internet decides the black stuff goes back in the box.

It's a strange thing to watch from where I sit, because a meaningful chunk of my customers do not participate in that at all. They buy a black mat in March. They buy a spirit board in July. The season was never the point.

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There's a specific kind of porch shame that arrives around the second week of November. The pumpkin has gone soft on one side. A cobweb decoration is hanging off a single nail because the other one gave up. And underfoot there's a doormat with a cartoon ghost on it that made sense for eleven days and now reads as "she stopped trying."

I've been making doormats since 2009 and I have watched this happen to a lot of front doors. Including mine. I made my Halloween porch ghosts out of…

In 1984 I was a high school kid at the North Carolina School of the Arts, sitting in an art history class I had no business being as obsessed with as I was. The teacher was Harry Titus. He was a professor at Wake Forest and he came over to teach high schoolers because he wanted to, which at fifteen I did not understand and at fifty-something I understand completely.

He taught us Rococo architecture. He taught us the difference between Ionic and Doric columns, which I can still tell…

Go look at your doormat. Right now, I'll wait. If the letters are half gone, one corner's curling up like a stale sandwich, & the whole thing has faded to the color of a wet paper bag — congratulations, you've been living with a doormat corpse & greeting every guest with it. It happens to the best of us. In fact, this is my own sad doormat! The doormat is the one thing in the house that works hard every single day & gets thanked never.

So let's talk honestly about…