It's not a criticism, it's an observation.

No one has ever come to our home on Halloween. Ever. When you live where one imagines banjo music playing in the background, and the house is nestled deep in the woods down a long, unlighted drive, the idea of bucking the odds for a miniature Baby Ruth is daunting at best. Current hysteria over child abusers and candy poisoners add to the reluctance even more.

When I was small, Halloween was like Christmas. Mothers all over the place used makeup, old clothes, and sheets to fashion scary costumes and let the kids run free and unsupervised. We used paper sacks and pillow cases to hold the booty we collected. A lot of it was homemade: rice crispy treats, cookies and various candies, sometimes wrapped in cellophane, other times not.

If that happened today, x- ray machines would have lines longer than the early voting places did, and those kindly old ladies who enjoyed baking for the neighborhood kids would have had torch- bearing lynch mobs in their yards.

When we became teenagers, trick or treating no longer was cool. We started busting pumpkins, rolling yards with toilet paper, and throwing eggs at cars. Those actions today will land little hoodlums in federal prison.

Halloween has become two holidays in this brave new century. Young adults use the date as an excuse to dress like some fantasy porn movie star and party 'til the goblins come home. Authority figures, fueled by conservative religious leaders, have almost obliterated the former Druid celebration of the harvest from the calendar of younger revelers.

Since Halloween is linked to witches, werewolves, and ghosts, many school and church officials have changed the celebration into an autumn fest filled with wholesome activities and benign customs designed to make sure no one is offended. But this is the Land of the Offended, home of the zero tolerance authority figure. Nothing is simple anymore.

A high school in north Texas refused entry into the Halloween night football game to anyone in costume. Not only was Dracula and Frankenstein barred, but so was Snow White. The school has a rule that extends the school dress code to include football games. The principal finally found her dictionary, looked up common sense, and decided to rescind the rule for Halloween, but by then most of the costumed fans were gone.

A fifth grader's assignment in art class, to draw the scariest Halloween mask he could, got him a psychiatric evaluation. His art teacher really liked his effort and added a couple of touches to make it super scary.

Everything was fine until the student's homeroom teacher saw the drawing and deemed it gang related. She called the principal and campus police. (When did elementary schools get campus police?) Never mind that the offending parts of the drawing were added by the art teacher.

The young Edgar Allan Poe was forced to undergo a psychiatric evaluation to make sure he was just talented, not demented or worse, one of those free thinking artistic types who hates America and wants to take away freedom.

There is no truth to the rumor he egged his homeroom teacher's house and Homeland Security was called.