Halloween

Somewhere yesterday I heard two adults give each other a final greeting: Have a happy Halloween. I'm trying to figure just when this turned into such a major holiday. I heard recently that it has become even more an adult holiday than a children's holiday. Looked around on the net and found an estimate that more than $6 billion would be spent on Halloween decorations, costumes, and candy.

Everything turns to pumpkins everywhere.

I found these outside Kowalski's grocery storm on Grand Avenue.

Target decorates for Halloween --

but probably on Tuesday it will turn to Christmas overnight.

There are as many greeting cards for Halloween as for Christmas or birthdays.

I thought perhaps Halloween celebrations aren't as modern I thought when I found this book display:

but I'm thinking perhaps the Christie book instead has a new cover for the 21st century.

Two memories emerge as this time of the year. One is the very memorable 1991 Halloween blizzard when we got 28 inches of snow. Because the streets were very warm -- the weather had gone from summer to winter in about 24 hour -- all of this snow turned to glaciers on the streets. It took road graders rather than snow plows to remove it.

The other -- my younger daughter was enrolled in Spanish Immersion School. The School had Amity teachers -- young university graduates from other countries. One of the Amity teachers taught a lesson as Dios de los muertos. At the next PTA meeting one parent complained about this, saying she didn't want her child to be exposed to Satanic practices. The Amity teacher burst into tears and the rest of us sat there with our jaws dropped, quite literally, recognizing this to be important holiday and commemoration  in other cultures and there is nothing Satanic about it. . Finally some got themselves well enough together to tell this parent that if she didn't want her child to learn about other cultures, she had certainly enrolled her in the wrong school.