When I was about four or five years old my family spent Hallowe'en with my grandparents in Paducah. After roaming the neighborhood with my little brother and father, trick-or-treating in my devil costume, we returned home to count our spoils, sorting the Mary Janes from the candy corn, the Bazooka Joe from the lollipops. As usual, it was a pretty big haul, and a lot of it was marked for immediate consumption.

With the kind of hindsight that comes from forty more years experience, I should've been suspicious when there was a knock on the door and my dad and grandpa told me to answer the door. But riding a sugar rush as high as the full moon I jumped to the door, plastic pitchfork in hand, only to be greeted by a wrathful spirit from the depths of hell itself.

The howling, shrieking beast at the door grabbed me, and I started beating the crap out if it with my pitchfork, for all the good it did. I was yelling and crying as though it was the end of the world, and would likely still be screaming today if not for my father and grandfather starting to laugh like mad. That's when I realized I had been set up, but I wasn't convinced until my uncle took off the fright mask. When he did I whacked him a good one with the pitchfork, then ran out of the room.

I'm sure that many people would use this as an example of why Hallowe'en is a wicked, evil holiday. Many more would use it to explain the way I have turned out as an adult. (I can't mount a convincing counter-argument to that one, either.) But for years following this incident, I was cautious about answering the door if I wasn't absolutely certain who was on the other side. A little caution is never a bad thing.