Each year the retailers start pushing the holidays on us earlier and earlier. This year, the ads started showing up in September. The kids are already talking about what they want to get, parents are already putting up outside lights and decorations and planning big dinners and spending money like there’s no tomorrow. Of course, I am talking about the biggest holiday of the year – Halloween.

Who doesn’t fondly remember their parents spending hours hanging up fancy, expensive outdoor Halloween lights, addressing and mailing their Halloween cards, and buying “Lord of the Rings”-quality costumes for all their kids. Who doesn’t recall with a warm glow downloading jack-o’-lantern patterns off the Internet and then having the images of Freddy Kruger photo engraved onto their pumpkins? Who cannot remember Mom buying bags of $2 candy bars for the neighborhood ghouls?

Yeah, me neither.

The way I remember it, we carved a pumpkin the weekend before. A big toothy thing, obviously done by enthusiastic but unskilled children, not something that looks like Martha Stewart spent a week on it. Hanging spooky holiday decorations in the trees outside our house never occurred to us. And when we went trick-or-treating, you were lucky if you got two or three candy bars the whole night. I think my mother gave out candy corn one year – one kernel per child. I don’t remember anyone complaining.