What happened to you, Halloween? You used to be cool.

We miss you, late eighties. Apparently the introduction of the "Trunk or Treat" has teamed up with local news scare tactics to keep kids off the streets. This year, we marveled at the suburb vacancy while walking our girls from door to door.  As parents, we reminisced about the hordes of costumed booger-eaters we'd grown used as kids. 

It wasn't all bad; even though Halloween this year was missing the troves of trick-or-treaters us "old folks" had gotten used to, it did offer shorts weather. Thank you, global warming for making bug spray a larger concern this Halloween than winter coats.

Perhaps our era has passed. This new, even lazier text-messaging generation has been presented with a loophole that makes collecting free candy even easier. These days, it is no longer necessary to walk from house to house when you can walk from parking space to parking space.

Either way, we will stubbornly preserve our traditionalist attitude and hit the pavement each October 31st - whether we have to trudge through snow or clouds of mosquitoes.