I always have, even when i was just a little kid.
Starting a few weeks before this makeshift bogus non-holiday, the horrendous advertisements start popping up everywhere. "Buy two pieces of ugly cheap plastic crap for the price of one!" "It's our scare-a-bration! Sale-o-ween! Frightfully low prices!, and so on...
Commercialization of certain days is not what really gets to me, though. It's more the fact that Halloween is essentially a contrivance in this country, and a gross one at that. The percentage of the US population that can trace a religious lineage to Celtic pantheists is infinitesimal, while the ones who come from a western church background should be aware of what a farce holiday Halloween really is from a Christian perspective. All Hallows day was just one more contrived festival designed to override the extant holiday celebrated by the locals that the missionaries were trying to convert. if you don't celebrate All Hallows day anymore, why Halloween?
What gets me more than anything is that the imagery is disgusting. Cheap plastic and rubber masks, hastily conceived replicas of carelessly designed Hollywood attempts to bring European folklore to life. Fake blood, bad makeup...it's all just stomach-churningly tacky, no to mention the sensory impact of so many artificial colors, smells, and textures.
Then there are the kids. Who thought it would be a good idea to get kids all worked up over things that give them nightmares, send them around to strangers begging for handouts, and then letting them consume pounds and pounds of corn syrup and refined sugars? Yeah, that's what this country needs...more poor kids being trained to extort goods from strangers while wearing masks. Or maybe they're just being primed to go around asking for handouts from strangers. Either way, it's a bad idea.
Lastly, there's the visual media. I can't even watch TV right now for the glut of "horror" movies all over the screen. The worst of it is, these films are not psychological thrillers or finely crafted suspense films by Hitchcock. No, we get channel after channel of late 20th century slasher flicks. Gore films long on cliche and short on plot. It's not even that they're gross or disturbing. They're bad films. Poorly made, poorly written, and poorly acted. It's like Halloween is America's excuse to throw any cheap crap out to an eager consumer-driven culture.
Halloween is the holiday version of a flea market in the rural South. It's a bad idea, full of low-class merchandise, and perpetuated by the dregs of our society.
Maybe one day we'll wake up and raise our standards. Until then, I'm sitting at home, porch light off, and waiting anxiously for the morrow.
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