The great thing about the Internet is that a nobody like me can sign up for a free blog account and, with a few button pushes, single-handedly bring an end to this silly crusade to cancel Halloween. Okay, maybe not, but I can dream can't I?

When I was a lad, Halloween was the second-most exciting holiday next to Christmas. I would spend the month or two leading up to the big day drawing what I wanted my costume to look like because my Mom would sew them for me from my drawings (except for the years I had a conniption to get those crappy store-bought, Ben Cooper plastic garbage bag outfits). Afterward I would go home to check out my candy winnings, hoping for a high ratio of Snickers bars.

So Halloween was a great time to exercise your imagination and get together with other kids. But around the time I was 13 and out of the trick-or-treating stage something unusual started happening. Adults started trying to ban Halloween!

We went to a McDonald's drive-thru one Halloween afternoon, and someone said something about Happy Halloween. The drive-thru clerk said, "Halloween is the devil's holiday!" It was? We'd never heard this one before. Wow, what a lone crackpot! And to think they touched our burgers!

More pots began cracking left and right though, to the point that the "Down with Halloween" movement in the Southeast (the area with the lowest SAT scores and highest poverty rate) is practically mainstream. From the ex-Hooters waitress I wrote about a few days ago to my ex-roommate I'm hearing all kinds of people giving a thumbs-up to the thumbs-down on Halloween movement.

Here are a few reasons why boycotting Halloween is bullshit:

• It's fun for kids. Little kids going around dressed as Miley Cyrus or Dracula just know it's fun to dress up and get candy. They're not trying to worship Beelzebub. Snickers bars are not sacraments to Satan, fer cryin' out loud. First you want to lengthen the school year, now you want to take away Candy Day. You won't rest until 10-year-olds are as miserable as adults, will you? Why don't you just get them started on mortgages and car payments?
  
  
• It's the last vestige of true European culture. Pagans aren't a mysterious cult of depraved goat worshipers, they're our ancestors. Before Saint Paul came to Europe with his carefully-marketed breakaway form of Judaism*, Europeans weren't singing hymns and reading C.S. Lewis, chasing their mental tail about whether or not they were "truly saved." They were dancing around maypoles, bobbing for apples and putting pumpkins in their windows to scare away evil spirits on the day the ghosts of their deceased ancestors returned to Earth. Halloween was a day to memorialize the dead. Likewise they were also worshiping bunnies as signs of fertility and abundant crops in the spring, and bringing trees into their homes in the winter because they believed good spirits lived in them. Sound familiar? If you want to ban Halloween, go ahead and ban Easter and Christmas, too.
  
  
• It's safe, family fun. Except for some kids wandering out in front of cars because of poorly-fitted masks, Halloween is a safe holiday. The urban legend of people putting razor blades in candy is an urban legend, and furthermore, hospitals are putting their highest-tech resources to work to allay your fears.
  
  It's also family fun. The work my Mom put into sewing up those costumes for me is a memory I wouldn't give up for anything. Looking back, it was team work.

That's my nutshell defense of Halloween.

Hey, I just thought of the scariest costume of all: a church nut who wants to ban Halloween!

* I'm not perfectly read-up on my history, but it went something like this.