I like that you get to go out and about on a nice Fall night with your kids. There’s always jokes, laughter, people trying to scare each other, and people who come up with the best ideas for costumes.
For me, its not about the candy. Its about the good time. 
We used to live in a neighborhood where the tradition was to give candy to the kids and little mini-cocktails to the adults. I loved that neighborhood.
Halloween is the best holiday by far and it can be treated as a season around here rather than just a day or two and that is a great thing. What’s not to like? The only reason I ever want to get in any position of power is just so I can abolish Thanksgiving and expand Halloween into that whole calendar period.
Shagnasty for president!
I love holidays in general. Halloween is great. I don’t care about dressing up myself but I am finally living in an area where I can give out candy to trick or treaters (nobody did it in the apartment complexes I used to live in) and I am looking forward to that. We also plan to carve pumpkins.
It’s not quite the same but you could look into if the Big Brothers Big Sisters in your area is doing any sort of Halloween event and could use a volunteer for that. It might be fun to have the chance to help carve pumpkins with the kids.
Seconded! I’ll gladly give my vote to anyone who’ll make Halloween a month long.
I like Halloween well enough, though I don’t dress up at work or anything. I mostly like carving pumpkins and seeing the little kids in their costumes.
I kind of wish there weren’t quite so many kids, though–we live in one of only two walkable neighborhoods in the county, so Halloween at our house is an event somewhere between an invasion and a Biblical plague. We get over 300 kids in less than 3 hours, so I just sit on the porch steps instead of driving the dogs nuts with the doorbell going every 20 seconds. At points there’s such a forest of little plastic buckets in front of me that I don’t even get to see what the kids are wearing, which is a bummer. And it gets really cold sitting still on a concrete step at night at the end of October, even with a cushion and bundled up and drinking hard cider.
I love Halloween. I usually go to my friend’s house and help her with her kids. She has three boys, 5, 8, and 11. We started the tradition the year the baby was born. Someone needed to carry him, dressed up like a skunk, no less. She was worried about keeping an eye on the other two with the baby, so I offered to help. We dress up as well as the kids. Her husband stays home and hands out candy. It’s become a nice tradition. Once the kids are all done, the neighborhood adults gather for drinks.
I like Halloween. as one of the generation that grew up with Dick Smith’s Monster Makeup Manual, I’ve been doing highly weird makeups using liquid latex, mortician’s wax, foam latex appliances, gelatine, crepe hair, and nose putty for ages.
The last job I worked at practically made a religious holiday of Halloween, decorating the front lobby with elaborate settings, having everyone take the day of the Halloween party effectively off, and throwing a big after-hours party with impressive prizes for contest winners. I did elaborate makeup and costumes while there.
Pepper Mill and MilliCal get into it, too. Pepper Mill sets up MilliCal’s old playhouse and decorates it as a haunted house. We carve Jack O’Lanterns, and this year Pepper mill wants to put our Dalek out front.
My feeling has been: If you tell your kids not to take candy from strangers. . . why would you let them go out and take candy from strangers?
I was not against them eating themselves into a sugar coma. So I made up a candy treasure hunt. I bought them the candy that they like, hid piles of it all over the house and back yard. I wrote up some riddle clues related to each location and placed them by the candy. We turned off all the lights, handed them flashlights and the first clue. We also carved pumpkins.
I’ll have to ask them if they felt deprived by not being allowed to Trick or Treat.
Why is everyone calling it a “holiday?”
Because it’s a day that people have decided has significance?
Hrummph. Doesn’t meet my sole criterion.
A day off work?
It’s still a holiday. Plenty of religious holidays don’t get people time off work but they’re still considered holidays.
Well, not in my dictionary. Carry on.
dalej42, if you’d like to avoid the unpleasantness at work there are numerous t-shirts on sale with some sort of Halloween motif on them. Perhaps this would make a compromise for you?
We love Halloween at our house. Every year I make new costumes for us and practically run a costume shop for friends and relatives. When the kids were little we dressed up to walk them around the neighborhood and it was a good opportunity to get to know the neighbors.
Now that the malls, with a little help from promoting fear in the general populace, have co-opted Halloween we scarcely get any trick-or-treaters. The only ones who come are the late evening adolescent boys, uncostumed and toting pillowcases to haul their loot. Misses the, uh, spirit of the whole occasion, greedy little rascals.
But reconsider a costume. Just think of what you can get away with when nobody knows who you are!
I love Halloween - just not the costume thing.
When asked - I just tell people I AM in costume. I go every year as an ‘Aging Alcoholic’.!
I like Halloween.
It’s interesting - it was a non event just a few years ago, but the idea seems to have floated (spookily?) across the Atlantic, and now it’s everywhere. We have pumpkin carving parties and the works, but as a kid there was pretty much nothing bar the odd scary movie on TV. Now the kids are trick or treating in the streets, and it’s great fun. Unless you live where the TorT amounts to an extortion racket, of course.
I don’t get dressed up, though. But many do.