How To Even…Do Halloween

By Michael Gushue & CL Bledsoe

Halloween is less that two weeks away. All the good pumpkins have been taken. If candy could get stale, it would be stale, because it went on sale in July. It’s not too late, though. We’re here to help. This week we’ll give you a primer on Halloween 101. In the following few weeks, we’ll show you how to even survive a paranormal encounter, and how to even remember your (spooky) dreams. By then it will be November, and you can catch your breath. We’ll still be here, though, every Thursday (until something better comes along). How To Even: the advice column that makes you want to throw rocks at other people’s advice column.

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Halloween used to be for kids. Come October 31, they’d dress up as ghosts, pirates, princesses, or your mom. They’d climb the sugary slopes of Trick Or Treat Mountain on their way to incipient diabetes. Grown ups would come to the door and fill pillowcases with every conceivable form of glucose, asking kids “who are you supposed to be?” as if the kids were entering a witness protection program.

There were two advantages to this system. First, children got to call the shots for one evening a year. This…