If it’s rainy and miserable outside, it must be Halloween.

You remember Halloween, right? It’s that holiday that comes three months after the stores start selling black and orange decorations.

At least I think it’s Halloween. It’s hard to tell anymore. The Halloween of my youth, complete with trick-or-treating and school parties, has been sterilized and reformed so that it no longer resembles the fun holiday it once was.

What happened to Halloween? Sociopaths and religious nut-cases have sucked all the fun out of it.

The demise of Halloween parties in public schools is a truly sad commentary on the times in which we live. A recent story in the Des Moines Register reported that this may be the last year for Halloween parties in Des Moines schools because some parents are concerned that celebrating Halloween encourages children to worship Satan.

Let’s see, an 8-year-old goes to school dressed like Donald Duck and gets a Rice Crispy treat. Yeah, there are some pretty obvious demonic overtones there.

By the way, when I say “dressed like Donald Duck,” I mean wearing a Donald Duck costume. You wouldn’t want kids going to school dressed the way Donald Duck dresses, because as you all know, Donald Duck does not wear pants. But I digress.

Instead of Halloween, the fun-haters want schools to have their class parties in celebration of “fall.” Fall is an entire season. What is there to celebrate about fall?

Trick-or-treating has also been tamed since the days when I scavenged my neighborhood for candy. Frankly, I blame suburban, yuppie people for killing trick-or-treating. Back in the old days, kids would go trick-or-treating at night, and they would actually go on HALLOWEEN.

Now, kids go out in broad daylight on some randomly selected day that is invariably not October 31. The yuppies also give it innocuous, cutesie names like “Beggar’s Night.”

Obviously, in this day and age, some precautions have to be taken. I remember being of trick-or-treating age and hearing news reports of people putting razor blades and needles in Halloween candy and passing it out to kids. I’d like to find the psycho who came up with this idea and carve his skull into a jack-o-lantern, because he ruined trick-or-treating for everyone.

But we may have gone a little overboard. Trick-or-treating at night was cool because for some reason, the neighborhood that seemed so safe every other day of the year was a little scary on Halloween night, and it was exciting.

Now kids trick-or-treat during the day accompanied by their parents, grandparents, a police helicopter and the National Guard.

Police officer with a megaphone: “You in the house! Put the Snickers bar in the sack and back away slowly!”

People are trying to take the scary parts out of Halloween. We now treat kids as if their psyches are made of eggshells. If somebody jumps out from behind his tree and scares the kids in his neighborhood on Halloween, he’s likely to get hauled in for child abuse.

My dad used to scare the hell out of my brother and me on Halloween, and we have only minimal emotional scars to show for it.

I remember one year when he bought an executioner’s mask and made an axe to go with it. He decided to try it out on me when I was in the bathroom. It was a good thing for me that I was in the bathroom at the time, too. It worked so well he used it for the Halloween party for my Cub Scout pack. After all, why just terrorize your own children when you can terrorize other people’s children, too?

For crying out loud, the TV networks don’t even show Halloween cartoons anymore. Every cartoon character in the world used to have a Halloween special. They took up whole evenings of network programming. I just recently found out that I already missed this year’s showing of “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” and it’s the only one left. Damn!

Halloween is one of the few holidays that is really geared towards kids. It is a chance for them to put on costumes and have some fun. That’s it. We should stop assigning more meaning to Halloween than there really is and let kids have their fun.

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Steven Martens is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Cedar Rapids.