Justice: Longing for the good ol' days of Halloween

I recently read that Halloween has become one of the most profitable holidays for retail businesses, with more than $5 billion spent annually on Halloween products. That same article stated Halloween is the second-biggest decorating holiday of the year, behind only Christmas.

When I was growing up, Halloween was simply a fun and cheap night of trick-or-treating with my brothers in our neighborhood. For better or worse, the Halloween of today feels different from the Halloween of 30 or more years ago.

As a starting point, we didn't buy our costumes from some "Freaks-R-Us" Halloween costume store, we made our own. Back then, we had only three basic Halloween costumes - at least in my neighborhood.

If you were a boy, you went trick-or-treating as a pirate - complete with the black eyepatch and fake "hook hand" made from aluminum foil. If you were a girl, you dressed up as a fairytale princess, with the obligatory tiara.

But if you were too chubby to make a decent-looking pirate or princess, or too gender-challenged to choose, you went trick-or-treating as a ghost. The only problem was that your costume typically was made with your own bedsheets, which meant you had to make up your own bed after trick-or-treating. So you just slept without sheets until Thanksgiving.

The "trick or treat" candy on Halloween night was both plentiful and cheap - bubble gum, candy corn, M&Ms, Animal Crackers, Milk Duds, Pixy Stix and Tootsie Rolls. Occasionally, a Hershey's, Baby Ruth or Three Musketeers candy bar would find its way into your sack. Unfortunately, these candy bars seemed to disappear after your parents inspected your sack for "contraband." As if my father really was looking for razor blades and needles. Sure he was.

Unlike today, Halloween didn't "spook" our family's pocketbook. We never once paid for admission to any "haunted house."

In our neighborhood, a rather strange and reclusive neighbor would fix up his garage for "haunted house" tours at Halloween. At "Mr. Baldy's" - not his real name - Haunted House, neighborhood kids would get the once-i

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