Happy Halloween!

It’s time once again for my favorite holiday. I’m not sure what hit me about Halloween that simply stirred my blood as a child. It certainly wasn’t the candy and treats. I really didn’t care. Where my younger brother would end up with a stomach ache on day one, that he wouldn’t let go of for the three days his stash would last, I would sometimes have tidbits left over around Christmas. I certainly did enjoy role playing, which extended into a hobby of D&D, Call of Cthulhu, and various other role playing games in my teens and early twenties. (A pleasure I abandoned for some time, until my teen aged boys took an interest in D&D and wanted me to run a campaign for them and their friends.) Not even that was the main draw for me. I think I simply liked having an excuse to scare people.

Probably the most fun I had on any Halloween was the year I was 12, where I certainly had no interest in walking door to door, but instead had our next door neighbor help dress me up as a rather stereotypical movie vampire, complete with white face makeup, cape and slicked down hair. I spent the entire evening hiding behind bushes, up in trees to drop down on unsuspecting munchkins and adults alike, spreading the cape and hissing. I’m pleased to report that I even startled a few adults.

I’ve done my share of Halloween acting for the kids who come to the door every year, but I’m saddened to say that things simply aren’t the same. I can’t work up the energy anymore, when the turnout is so dull.

Let me explain. The Mormons, among other things, have simply ruined the holiday. Theses days they hold Trunk or Treats. A few years ago the concerned parents of the Mormon church out here in the Salt Lake valley (which seems like most of the population), where almost nothing bad ever happens, decided that the safest way to hold the holiday was to gather in the local ward parking lot and have the little tykes be bussed in via their parent’s cars, to walk around from vehicle to vehicle through the parking lot to collect candy from each parked car. If you think that sounds lame, it is. It’s the K-Mart blue light special of Halloween activities.

There still are some hold-outs who go house to house, but the numbers seem to dwindle every year. So it just doesn’t pay to put on a show around here. Hopefully, the rest of America is not following this pathetic trend of laziness dressed in Safety-Nazi attire.

We decorate a little outside the house and do our yearly Jack O’Lantern carving, but we don’t do the kinds of things we used to. I guess the holiday geared around the day where the boundary between the living and the dead is supposed to be the thinnest, fell through that thin barrier and died.

Oh, well. At least I still get to carve up some Jack O’Lanterns.