October 31st, Halloween has taken a lot of abuse throughout the years. And rightly so. We're talking about a holiday whose two historical roots involve pagan sacrifice and the reformation of the Catholic church. Naturally, both traditions have left an impact on the way the holiday runs. On the one hand, people pass out gluttonous amounts of candy and pretend to have demonic spirits in the house. On the other, people still invite little children dressed in costumes into their houses. All Catholic bashing aside, I feel that Halloween holds an appropriate amount of holiday power. Everyone gets to dress up and party, but you don't hear of anyone flying across continents to visit family or setting up elaborate household routines that begin two or three days before the actual holiday.

But as everybody knows, Halloween provides something much more valuable than the casual family fun and dancing skeletons. I am referring of course to a girl's ability to dress like a total skank without running a relatively elevated risk of being raped. Halloween gives us all a time to don a new identity which is rather appealing to many at Vanderbilt who are rather insecure about the one they have. And don't worry, we'll all think your political costumes as McCain, Obama, and Palin are incredibly innovative, humorous, timely, and totally original, especially if you try to imitate their exaggerated personas during a party. Another thing that always peaks my interest is the number of college or above aged people, who are not parents that will legitimately claim that they go out trick-or-treating.

I will say the one thing that disappoints me around Halloween is the lack of commitment to pumpkins. What happened to our love of the harvest season? I recently read a children's book called "The Pumpkin Book". It contained a lot of worthwhile facts related to pumpkins. But what struck me was that this is the only time that we, as a society, collectively have the opportunity to unite in showing our support for a native vegetable. You don't even have to decorate or carve your pumpkin. You can get whatever pumpkin you want. It's just that if you don't get a pumpkin, millions of Americans will have died in vain to secure your pumpkin picking rights. I really hope you got the voting analogy, otherwise it just sounds like I'm talking a lot about pumpkins.

But seriously, pumpkins are pretty terrific and for us extremely casual decorators (guys), they add a great seasonal spice and are for sale pretty much everywhere, including our very own bookstore.

What is best about Halloween this year is its timeliness in giving us something to look forward to. There need to be some high expectations for Halloween weekend celebrations in order to overcome the gnawing reality that we could legitimately drop seven football games in a row to unbelievably miss a bowl again; plus any lingering disappointment from another sub-par Quake event marred by faulty acoustics. So naturally there's an eagerness to get back to our bread and butter: dorm pre-gaming and frat costume parties.