Another Halloween is upon us, which I still think is a wasted holiday. Yet another day where Hallmark can make a buck on stupid greeting cards, Hershey’s can sell candy that’s been sitting on the shelves since September so everyone can get even fatter by eating way too much junk, and little kids can dress up in the dumbest most un-scary costumes ever conceived. When we went trick-or-treat as kids, we tried to come up with scary costumes. My mother made better costumes than you could ever buy at K-Mart, we’re talking Dracula with white face paint and fake blood and a cape. You try to buy that at Wal-Mart and you’re going to find cheap cloth that will rip if you bend over too fast, along with a plastic mask that wouldn’t scare anyone in a dark alley. That is, of course, if your kid even wants to be Dracula. Now they are more likely to want to be whatever the most recent movie featured, which means everyone this year will be dressed as Optiums Prime and Indiana Jones. (How about the Joker? At least HE was scary looking!) Not that it matters what you look like, since trick-or-treat gets earlier every year so any effect the darkness might have had on your costume is wasted. Wouldn’t want to scare anyone by wandering around in the dark, so now you get to roam the streets at 4pm wearing bright colors that can be seen from space. All that money on glo-sticks and jack-o-lantern flashlights wasted. And how scary is someone’s house going to look in the middle of the afternoon? People would go all out, strobe lights, cobwebs, heck some of them even turned their entire downstairs into haunted houses. Can’t do that anymore, thanks to the occasional sicko who loves having little children over. Now you have to settle for inflatable ghosts and moving spiders and Frankenstein monsters that wouldn’t scare a 3 year old because they’re big and bright green and puffy and round and smiling at you. Because monsters are just SO friendly. Wouldn’t want to scare anyone, after all it IS Halloween. On the other hand though, I guess we can’t really demand that we go back to the “true spirit” of Halloween, considering that the original festivals involved some Druid guy cutting out the spleen of a 14 year-old virgin and offering it up as tribute to something or another. No way we’d get away with that nowadays – good luck finding a 14 year-old virgin.