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LAST WRITES
By Richard J. Schellbach
Oct 31, 2006, 08:53

STOP SCREWING WITH MY DAY!

So, I’m in a massive department store, checking out the DVD bargain bin when, way off in the distance, I hear the rancid sound of electronic, digitized bells, playing Christmas music. (Ding Dong Merrily On High, if memory serves… but that’s not important.) I followed the noise until it led me to three aisles of Christmas decorations. Three full aisles of artificial trees, snow in cans, Styrofoam ornaments and Santa figures, dressed like Flavor Flav, that dance to “Ice Ice Baby”. Mind you, if this had happened last December, I’d have no gripe, well except for the dancing Santa. But, no, the day I did the bargain bin binge, was this past August! That’s right, Christmas decorations in August! Now, I don’t know where you’re from but the words South Florida and August are not conducive to thoughts of decking the halls with anything other than ceiling fans! It’s hotter than Lucifer’s nutsack down here in August and, quite honestly, I don’t want to know from eight maids a milking – no matter how perversely sexual that sounds.      

With the carols from Hell bouncing around between my ears, I headed over and looked for the Halloween decorations. Did I find any? Were there pumpkins, candy corn, masks, rubber knives or even orange and black M&Ms? Of course not! Those aren’t put out till late-September. To do so any earlier would just be silly, right? But Christmas decorations a full four months before Christmas, somehow that’s okay. Does that assault anyone else’s senses? You see, I wouldn’t give a rat’s ass when they started with the Thanksgiving/Christmas/Chanukah/Quanza decorations if there wasn’t a holiday in between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. But there is. It’s a little ditty we like to call Halloween. And Halloween is my favorite holiday. Since you come to this site to get your reading material, I’ll go out on a limb and assume it’s probably most of yours’ too. To everyone else, sorry Christmas folks, sorry Chanukah folks, sorry Quanza folks… your holidays are burying my beloved Halloween and I’m pretty pissed off about it!

I don’t mean to wax nostalgic here but I miss the good old days, when Halloween meant something. Do you realize that, years before cable, there was actually more horror on five or six stations – on a weekly basis - than there is now? The TV Guide called them “melodramas” back then and anyone around my age remembers, fondly, that on any given Friday or Saturday night, you actually had to choose between horror movies. There was Chiller Theater, Shock Theater and Creature Features, to name just a few. For Halloween, my local PBS station (Channel 13, out of NYC) used to play Universal horror movies by the handful. Channels 5 (WNEW), 7 (WABC), 9 (WWOR) and 11 (WPIX) used to go absolutely ape-shit with horror films in October. Some of my local movie theaters used to have special Halloween horror movies playing on weekends. My parents used to get 150 trick-or-treaters. Things like this never happen anymore. Each year, Halloween becomes less current and more a thing of the past. Now, seven stations in every market play the same 3 movies, loaded with commercials and cut up worse than a Crystal Lake camp counselor. Some religious groups continue to try to put an end to Halloween because they don’t want their kids – and I quote – “Honoring Satan”. I guess they figure your six year old has pretty much sold his or her soul, if they dress up like a Care Bear once a year. Too much political correctness has one school district in Washington State banning Halloween activities because they think real witches will be offended. (I’m not making this stuff up, folks!) Parents who have wonderful Halloween memories from their childhood, don’t even bother taking kids around anymore. Hell, I bought 40 pieces of candy this year and I’ll be shocked if I even come close to running out. 

So, what are we to do? Although it’s not my favorite solution, I have one that I know will work. I would love for the “normal” people out there to suddenly rise up and save Halloween but it isn’t going to happen. To them, it’s not worth the fight. So, what I’m going to do is to keep Halloween going strong, inside me. What I mean is, no matter when they start putting out the Christmas decorations, no matter what butchered crap they show on TV, no matter how few kids come to the door, no matter who tries to take the last breath out of my holiday, Halloween will always be numero uno to me and I’ll do whatever I can do to keep it that way. They can screw with my holiday but they can’t screw with my head. Whether I get six or sixty trick-or-treaters, I’ll hand out candy. No matter how busy my day is, I’ll make time for at least one horror movie. I’m paraphrasing, but there’s an old saying that some of you are familiar with: “For the forest to be green, each tree must be green.” I think it applies here. If each of us does our little part to keep Halloween current, it will never truly become extinct. And as long as Halloween is alive within me… it’s alive.