Halloween is not my favorite holiday. I remember enjoying it when I was a kid, but I also remember it being a much smaller deal. Maybe a few construction-paper black cats at school, carved pumpkins and homemade costumes (my two best were Superman, which involved blue tights and a red towel, and a totally great mad scientist outfit, with my best friend as my monster), a shopping bag of candy from the houses on the block, and that was the end of it. Now all the grownups dress up and have parties and you can send Halloween cards. Halloween cards? And of course, here in the Village we have what used to be a little local parade lead by Ralph Lee’s puppets when he lived here, and then later, since it got bigger and is restricted to a broad avenue, its permit no longer allowing it to wind through the small streets (in the beginning years they didn’t have a permit), by drag queens in fabulous outfits. The parade is still great, but the spectators have developed the same relationship to drag queens as the St. Patrick’s Day parade spectators have to the Irish: they’re a great excuse to come downtown, get drunk and run around screaming. But I think my basic problem with Halloween is that it’s supposed to be about letting the scary things – spirits, dead people, monsters -- run loose once a year to prove to ourselves that we can conquer them. And it’s totally lost any of that, any real sense of fear or the idea that there are things just beyond our waking, rational minds – maybe inside us, but there nevertheless – that it’s important to at least acknowledge.