For Halloween, less prep, more kvetch, please

You know what today is: the end of the mandatory month-long death-related candy festival. Since Halloween falls on a Friday, kids can stay up a bit longer, metabolizing the high-fructose corn syrup that keeps them careening off walls. Grown-ups can have dress-up parties and stay up late and maybe have a sleep-over! Yes, it's fun for all. But it wouldn't be a newspaper column without a troubling development, and we have one: no controversy.

We've avoided the usual Halloween arguments this year -- between the gut-clenching economic gyrations and the election, no one's had the time to trot out the usual shibboleths. (Unless they went to a party as a Shibboleth, of course.) Let's revisit the standard objections, just to remind us what we should be outraged about.

One: The costumes are too revealing for little girls. My child wanted to be a devil this year. I had to ask: a devil, or the devil? Because the latter would be the Lord of the Flies himself, the Father of Lies, the fallen demon who presides over an infinite expanse of stinking pitch loud with the lamentation of the damned.

The former is just an employee. It's like the difference between the President and the Assistant to the Undersecretary for Oversized Butt-Jabbing Forks. The distinction seemed irrelevant; she just wanted the fork and the horns and the cape. Fine. Off to Target.

At Target, two choices: one demure devil suit, and another with a saucy cut. Like many fathers, I have a specific and potent reaction to hoochie-gear aimed at 8-year olds: I want to corral the makers and marketers and ask them DO. YOU. HAVE. A. LITTLE. GIRL. The answer cannot possibly be yes, but I'd like to find out for myself.

Response: Lighten up, Cotton Mather. Why don't you go to a party as Cotton Mather this year, and roam around the party shouting HARLOTS! UNCLEAN! Well, I'm not overreacting. The role of a father is to disapprove of My Little Trollop costumes, and that doesn't mean you're some sort of killjoy prude.

Sexy Nurse costumes for adults are a different matter, of course. But I'm not sure why. After a while, a guy is more attracted to the sexy Lab Results Tech who gives you the all-clear, or the sexy Insurance Claims Adjuster who says "Oh, it's covered." Neither costume sells well, though.

On the Ethical and Cuddly Continuum, pirates and Pooh occupy opposite ends. Sure, pirates are big this time of year, and they're always jolly yo-ho timber-shivered characters, but the real pirates were nasty characters -- brutal, drunk, unmoored from social norms, a pestilence to free trade. Let a few centuries pass, though, and they're cuddly enough for Pooh format.

It's like waking up in four centuries and finding kids are dressing like ... well, like Darth Vader, the guy who blew up planets and killed billions of people but ended up a good guy in Force Heaven because he threw his boss down a ventilation shaft. There's a good lesson for the tykes.

Response: Oh, relax. Kids crave the delicious permission the holiday grants, and it's a chance to express their naughty impulses in safe, socially sanctioned context. It's not like you get a dozen little Hitlers at the door with spit-slicked hair demanding to annex the Polish Corridor.

Three: It's all about the candy. Response: No! That can't possibly be so! Next you'll tell me that Christmas isn't about Reindeer Hoof Health Awareness Month!

Bottom line: It's fun. It's too long. Could we edit it down to two weeks? When I was a kid (cue the Ken Burns documentary fiddles) the Ben Franklin paper skeletons went up in the window the day before, and the event somehow had more focus, more potency.

As the retailers might say: Oooh. Scary.