Rant #1,543: Happy Halloween

The most non-holiday of all of what we consider to be "major" holidays during the year comes up on Saturday.

It is Halloween and as an adult in this world we live in, to me it is much ado about nothing.

It seems that little kids still love the holiday, and older people of all ages who are perhaps having their own senior moments love this holiday, too.

To me, this is a kid's holiday, plain and simple.

To have adults get all riled up about the holiday is nonsense.

We are in the process of making a kids' holiday into something that it isn't, and was never meant to be, at least in the current sense of what Halloween is.

I was probably the first person in my family to partake of Halloween.

My parents certainly didn't.

Back when they were kids, this holiday was thought to be a non-Jewish holiday, and many Jews didn't participate in the holiday, nor did they participate in Valentine's Day festivities, because, after all, it is Saint Valentine's Day, isn't it?

Anyway, by the 1950s and 1960s and into the early 1970s, the commercialization of Halloween began, pretty much in parallel with the emergence of TV as our entertainment medium of choice.

My mom bought my costumes as a little kid, and I do remember going as Superman one year.

As I got older and we moved to the 20-building Rochdale Village development in South Jamaica, Queens, New York, I would go alone through our building, or with my friends and/or my younger sister.

Yes, one year she got pins in her apple. We knew who did it, but in those days, you just threw the apple into the garbage pail. It was an old woman who did it--why would we want to do anything to her? It was bad enough she had wanted to do it to us.

Anyway, by the time I was in by near teens or early teens, I didn't even dress up anymore, going from apartment to apartment and building to building to get bags and bags of candy and money.

I remember that someone I knew was jumped for his candy one year. Another year, we had eggs thrown at our door.

The holiday was starting to become a time for more tricking than treating, I guess.

Move to the 1980s and 1990s, and adults began to get into Halloween too deeply. There were always adult parties for the holiday, but not only weren't parents letting their kids go out by themselves anymore--certainly reflecting the changing times--but they were now having their own parties.

Yes, it was getting ridiculous, with even more marketing going into adult costumes than ones for little kids.

Now, we still have the holiday, but it cannot possibly be as glorious or as fun as what my generation experienced as kids.

It is too structured, the kids only go where the parents let them, and some parents use the holiday to make political statements, using their own children as the "models" for this nonsense.

I recently saw a post on Facebook where some parents really went too far, I thought, to make a point.

They dressed up their sons--probably around five to eight years old or so--in Cheech and Chong outfits that it appears were crafted just for the occasion by mom and dad.

Well, say what you want, but No. 1, the kids couldn't possibly know who Cheech and Chong are or were, second, I doubt they chose these costumes themselves, and three, sorry, using your kids to make a point during Halloween is not the right thing to do.

I know the pro-marijuana lobby is strong, but please, if you think that smoking pot is good, fine, but please, don't involve your kids in your own personal claptrap.

And then we have the manufacturers who want to dress up pre-teen girls like little tarts, way before they need to even know about such things.

Revealing outfits, leaving little to the imagination, is one thing on women who supposedly know what they are doing. Putting such outfits on little girls just a few years out of diapers is just something so reprehensible that I cannot believe that parents buy this stuff for their daughters.

And as the parent of a daughter, no, I won't show a picture of a kid in one of these outfits. It really is disgraceful.

No, Halloween is not the same as it once was, and I am very happy to say that I was around when Halloween was nothing but fun, fun and more fun.

Leave the political messages somewhere else, but don't promote this stuff on Halloween.

It just isn't right.

Happy trick or treating (mostly treating, I hope), and I will speak to you again on Monday.