Halloween 2015: Thank God that's over and done with

Halloween is now behind us, which means those hideous yard displays are headed back into storage. I'm particularly repulsed by the one a few blocks from my home that features gigantic plastic inflatables: a witch, Grim Reaper and vampire. That would be bad enough, but this trio stand watch over an eight-foot-tall inflatable arch that is topped by a huge, red-eyed creature.

Trick or treating and pumpkin carving have their place. But our Halloween fixation with the dead, the undead, the nearly dead, etc., is out of control, and it seems to grow worse every year. The National Retail Federation reported a while back that Halloween is the second biggest grossing holiday, after Christmas. There are seasonal stores devoted to the holiday.

At the risk of sounding cranky and misanthropic, spending wads of cash to celebrate all things ghoulish and ghastly in as tasteless, excessive and expensive a fashion as possible strikes me as yet another sign that our society isn't all that healthy these days. No doubt George Romero would disagree.