I watch with amazement as my next door neighbor places some type of webbing over his hedge row and sets a large rubber spider in the middle. Next he has a skeleton head when inflated the mouth moves up and down. I ask him what he was doing and he quickly told me he was celebrating Halloween. This immediately sent me to the internet to verify his comment about ‘celebrating’.

It was fairly unanimous between Google and Wikipedia that Halloween falls somewhere between Allhallowtide, the devil, the ancient Celtic festival known as Samhain and something vaguely known as all saints eve. In other words even the internet does not know what we are celebrating. Using logic can we deduce that we are celebrating a ‘fake’ holiday?

Upon further investigation I read that according to the National Retail Federation, Americans are projected to spend $7.4 billion on Halloween this year. Get this, this amount includes $350 million on costumes for pets. There is something the dogs and I agree, the decoration situation is a problem.

If all of the information gathering was not enough to convince me we were celebrating a ‘fake’ holiday, factor this fact into the equation. For one night we give children candy in excess while telling them the rest of the year candy consumption is not good for you and will cause tooth cavities and hyperactivity.

I suppose in my traditional thought pattern where holidays have specific decorations corresponding to the significance of the holiday, i.e Christmas, very significant with lots of decorations, Thanksgiving, very significant not a lot of decorations, Fourth of July, significant not a lot of decorations. There is just something about the fake orange spider webbing and generator-powered decorations that make me ask “what are we celebrating?’

Finally, I am in preparation for random people wearing masks to ring my doorbell even after I have turned the porch light off. I know they are not strangers only friends I haven’t met.