What could be a bigger spectacle than Halloween? You tell me. One year I saw a man dressed up as a vagina, with a little pink cap on his head, arms flapping around covered in felted folds, different shades of mauve and salmon. If that’s not unwanted public interaction well then I just don’t know what is.

People really just love any excuse to vomit: miniature Twix, brandied apple cider, syrupy false blood from a costume store, mass produced in some illegal factory in China. Add to that the impending doom of the East Coast winter, and you have men from Jersey, swinging from the handlebars of the Q train in spandex underwear. There’s a lot to be said for the speed and convenience of an express train, but when you are throttling across the Manhattan Bridge with only the night sky above you and the East River below, you must accept the company you are given for at least 17 full minutes. That company might be kneeling on all fours, blond wig askew, breathing laboriously as a sizable string of drool makes its way to the speckled subway floor. Up and down the saliva goes, like the mercury on an alien thermometer. The unfortunate fellow’s friends continue their campaign as the members of World Wrestling Entertainment, slow motion punching and chin ups, over the seat of a frightened Playboy Bunny. Which would be worse, I ask myself, being kicked in the face with an old sneaker, sheathed in the cheap polyester of an imitation boot, or, spending the next 17 minutes backing away from the vomited result of too many Jägerbombs? Knock me out, I decide, and wake me at Thanksgiving.

Don’t get me wrong. I love a costume, and Hocus Pocus is one of my favorite holiday movies, but Halloween was never one of my favorites as a child. Sure, when I was younger, there was the simple joy of the local trick-or-treat; up and down my block, knowing exactly what to expect. Purple Nerds from the ex-cop’s family two doors down, or donuts, from the elderly woman we were allowed to trust, though public school had warned us that baked goods would inevitably contain clandestine razor blades.

As I grew older, my friends and I would head uptown, to the ‘big’ houses, lured by false promises of king-sized candy bars. I’m assuming that the kids who trick-or-treated on my block felt they were shopping one step up, and expected great things from our medium-sized houses. I remember my mother began to grow frustrated with the attitudes of our ‘customers,’ and would try to impart simple wisdom to them as they passed.

“Damn, Miss, only one piece?”

“You should be happy for what you’ve got!”

She was a stickler for the rules and took no issue with explaining to languid mothers that Halloween was for Children Only. You must be present and in costume to receive candy, no ifs, ands, or buts. And she wasn’t accepting doctor’s notes either, for the women who might say: “I have a kid home sick, let me get an extra piece for him?”

The crowds grew rowdier and the final straw came one year, later at night after we had handed out all our candy. We turned the lights out in the house, closed for business, so to say. I happened to be in the front hall when a group of girls came to the porch, ignoring our obvious, dark, statement that we were devoid of candy, out of holiday cheer. They saw me, and through some skewed logic felt that should I be present in my own house on October 31, I owed them a handful of high fructose corn syrup.

“TRICK OR TREAT,” they yelled threateningly, and I stood frozen to the floor. The girl began knocking, knocking on the door and then, opened it. For whatever ungodly reason, it was unlocked. She yelled something into the house: “BOO,” or the like, and then, perhaps realizing she had committed the early steps of a felony, withdrew into the night, with her fellow vampires.

Well that was just the end of that. No more candy, said my mother, and decided to boycott Halloween.

The next year, coming back from my conquest, heavy pillowcase in hand, the chill of the October wind on my skin, I stood horror-struck at my front porch. What did I see? No, not a smashed pumpkin, not a tangle of toilet paper in our faux-pear tree. Not any classic Halloween prank at all, just the devious machinations of my clever mother’s mind: strung across the front steps of our house, a thin white rope, and attached, an index card which read:

“WET PAINT”

It could not possibly have been any clearer that the porch was dry as a bone, a skeleton bone, say, for Halloween. It had not been painted in years. Flakes of evergreen polyurethane peeled off every inch, revealing the gray paint of yesteryear, wood splinters spiking through.  So our house went in costume, year after year, as a freshly painted mansion. My mother exorcised the demons, we were unbothered by ghouls, witches, wrestlers, or the urban populace.

Here in New York, I feel the same way: holidays are for other people. I close my window shades, stay away from the subway, maybe even hop a bus out of town for the weekend. What can I say? Every day is a little bit like Halloween here, so come October, I’ve already had enough.