My kids were trying to decide on what to be for Halloween this year. They went simple and effective...keeping in mind that the church festivities prevent choosing "scary" stuff. Kelsey and her friends decided to be fairies. Shelby will be a cat. This week-long discussion got a few Halloween thoughts flowing:

My favorite Halloween costume from my childhood was when I was 12. I went as Paul Stanley from KISS, and drew on fake chest hair. My friend went as Gene Simmons and actually had some fake blood pills he could chew on and spit out. The guy that was Ace Frehley got sick and we never did find a Peter Criss. It's hard to walk about 3 miles in poorly crafted platform shoes.

There's a guy in our neighborhood who has a huge python. The guy puts the snake in the middle of the driveway and sits in front of it with a bowl of candy. After the "trick-or-treat" demand, he offers the kids a choice. You can have two pieces of candy from him, but if you hop over the snake you can grab two handfuls from the bowl on the other side. Of course, you're actually committing to hopping the snake twice. I'd like to stay there all night and watch the revelatory reactions of the various kids.

I have always disliked the kids on or near their "last" Halloween who go around emptying the bowls of candy people who aren't home leave on the "honor system." Even when I was a kid this tactic annoyed me. To this day I've never done it.

I enjoy that combination of terror/fun when you go to a neighbor's hosue and they have the piano theme music from the horror flick playing and then, after you get your candy, they chase you out of the yard by simply firing up the chainsaw in the garage wearing a hockey goalie mask and peering around a corner at you. I can see why their wives bark at them when they choose to do it to the smaller kids, but when you're 11, it's scary/awesome.

I always liked haunted houses, too. I especially liked the interactive ones where you put your hands in spaghetti in the crazy surgeon's patient's gut. You can also be scared out of your wits by someone simply walking at you if there's a strobe light going behind them.

There's another guy in my neighborhood that set up stuff this year to look like the last 5 minutes of a horror flick, with all sorts of bodies all over the yard. The best one is a poor dude who has been electrocuted on the light pole on the corner of his property. He was also impaled. It's hard to figure out if the electrocution happened before or after the impaling, but my suspicion is before (although there's still the matter of how he got impaled because...well, you have to see it). I overheard a suburban soccer mom faction discussing whether or not to ask him to tone it down. I think that discussion is best left to dads.

All this, and I still don't have a costume idea for me this year...