Late-Season South Shore Foliage

We did a few Foliage trips around the South Shore last week.

"South Shore" is sort of an indiscriminate term, as places like Middleboro and Wareham really shouldn't count, but we didn't get Fall Riverish enough to call it a South Coast/South Shore crossover.

That fact doesn't really matter much- especially in an article about leafs on a tree- but it matters a lot to the people who it matters to.

We try to keep moving when we work...

Sometimes we shoot out the window. Worry not, the driver isn't shooting. He drives, the passenger spots and shoots. The driver determines the general direction that we go, while the spotter is in charge of when we stop. 

Maybe you work differently... or maybe I'm too lazy to crop the dashboard out of this pic, and decided to joke around it. 

We let our daily business dictate our photo work a lot, so we sort of ran a Wareham-Carver-Plymouth-Kingston-Duxbury back down to Bourne route.

We've been meaning to do Cape Cod, as we veteran leaf peepers feel that Cape Cod doesn't peak before November. Unfortunately, the Cranberry Chevy has been running poorly recently, it's an expensive fix, and we may have to be Innovative. We may even have a contest.

I'll worry about that later, as it is very late at night and I have pictures to share with you.

I like writing in the middle of the night. The night helps me focus. 

I'm pretty sure that I waltzed out of Duxbury High School in the 1980s just a few years before stuff like Asperger Syndrome and ADHD became the go-to diagnosis model for American school psychologists. If I was a 1970s birth, I'd be full of Ritalin and asleep right now.

I tend to be distracted during the day. Even in the relative isolation that I managed to carve out for myself, stuff- people walking around, approaching vehicles, the discharge of a rife now and then- happens on my street that I have to pay attention to.

That's not the case during the Witching Hour. The darkness obscures all visual distractions, reducing me to Tyrannosaurus Rex-style motion detector status. Anything moving around in my yard at this hour is most likely something that I might have to kill, probably with my hands (I support America's gun rights 101%, but I'm a bit too clutzy/nutty to responsibly own a firearm myself). That sort of tension adds a nice edge to my work.

Hey, you try writing about leaves... 

I've said it before, but Southeastern Massachusetts is tough for shooting Foliage. We lack the elevated spots that you get in places like New Hampshire, where you get those sweeping mountain valley views that you see in the calendars. We sometimes have to leave some dude's truck in the picture.

I'd shoot off of the Bourne or Sagamore Bridge, but that area is cursed with scrub pine. You get a greenish/orangey/semi-brown mix shooting from up there, sort of a bronzed Aquaman.

I have plans for that region, which we will get to in a future article.

Our responsibility runs out at the Rhode Island border. We love Rhodey. We're just a Massachusetts thing.

Even then, we stick to the Eastern part of the state. It simplifies things. 

Shoot, we could give you Colorado pictures if you want, but I don't think that they grow cranberries out there.

It's best if we stay in Massachusetts.

We do have good foliage down here. It's more of a rural driving expedition thing than a hiking thing, although you can see some nice Leaf if you go deep in the forest. You even get Early Peak in the areas of the forest where the sun doesn't shine that brightly.

We'd also recommend using an online map service to plan your trip. You can work a few lakes into your route (we didn't do so on this trip, but you can), and be sure to keep it Rural.

Orange was the hardest color for us to find. Various shades of red are everywhere, with a slow fade to brown taking over as the Fall part of autumn starts to assert herself. Yellow is second easiest, and orange is the hardest.

I see Blue in some Vermont photos, but I'm not a savvy enough Leafpeeper to know what trees do that or why we don't have them here.

We'll try to expand our reach into the northern states next year.  We got to Maine in September, but it was pre-peak. After that, we were lucky to get out of Plymouth County. Busy month,,,

We do perform an important service here. We get it out on the Internet that southeastern Massachusetts, and especially Cape Cod, still has peak foliage.

If you live in or are visiting New England, it is quite simply Too Damn Late for you to see peak foliage unless you get your bad self down to southeastern Massachusetts. You could go to Vermont, but it's brown and desolate up there... and everyone smells like syrup.

We don't want you to have to go through all that, when you can dip an hour or two south of Boston and see perfect late-season fall foliage.

Even with our best efforts, we tend to be more Suburban than Rural. This is why we have to zoom in on tress so closely,when panning back or whatever they call that may be more what the shot calls for.

It also gives us the Flood o' Color that we love so much. It is very colorful down here. I didn't have to edit these shots at all, which wasn't the case with our previous foliage work. 

This is good, because my mouse has no Right Click button now. Not being able to scoot down to Radio Shack is one of the downsides of working the Werewolf Shift, but it is a condition that I tolerate.

I swear that, when I went to the other side of the tree to shoot it without the guy/s house in the background, the color wasn't as satisfying. Therefore, he suffers so that you can zone out on some Reds.

If homeboy objects we'll remove the picture or crop his house out of it or something.

We like our readers to be happy. Sure, we'll fight with them on Facebook now and then, but it's all in good fun.

I tried and failed to frame the Myles Standish Monument between two trees with my cheapo Wal-Mart camera that was last seen being hit directly by a wave during our nor'easter coverage a few weeks ago.

I could have zoomed in more, but it might have made the picture blurry.

I am very much a photographer of the Take Fifty To Use Ten variety.

We have two or three more articles on Foliage coming up

1) A piece where we discuss lining the Cape Cod Canal with foliage-friendly trees in a crazed attempt to make it a 2075 AD tourist attraction.

2) A contest where we troll Facebook for people to take Cape Cod foliage pics which we will publish. A cheapo prize will go to the winner.

3) The article with the results of the contest.

We loved this month, because the nor'easter didn't kill the foliage. It did damage, but it didn't bring about a premature end of the season.

Check this tree below, which lost her leaves directly under her. Raking the yard under this tree is a breeze...

... unless, of course, there's a breeze!

Peep ya later!

Leftovers From Our Foliage, Cranberry And Halloween Travels

I think that the people on the right turn before Edaville Railroad have had just about enough of TomTom's flaws.

The first article Jessica and I did together was us mistakenly thinking that Edaville was closed and abandoned, like the Lakeville Speedway or something.

A phone call from a detective proved that we were incorrect.

It all worked itself out. We were harmless. "Respectable citizens. Multiple felons, perhaps, but certainly not dangerous."

This fellow came up on me while I was shooting a pic of the cool barn he lives in. The barn made the article, but the horse had to wait for us to get to the Leftovers article.

We do a lot of trespassing, although we generally have no reason to trespass on the property of people whom the Ultimate Warrior referred to as "normals."

You kind of have to earn our presence on your property, and 99% of our small trespass violations involve us getting a pic of something that the homeowner was most likely showing off anyhow.

We're generally well-received, and we have a good sense of when Jessica should talk to the person and be sweet/nice, and when I should act crazy and try to crack them up... or, in some cases, scare them away.

We have developed an effective Mojo, and can generally move about now without any bother.

That's Green Harbor, in Marshfield.

I say that because there appears to be a Green Harbor Resort in West Yarmouth, as well.

I'm not sure if the Yarmouth one is named after a Green Harbor out there.

Either way, the Green Harbor in Marshfield is named after William Green, who opened a commercial fishing enterprise there in 1627.

Yarmouth, however is more likely better-known worldwide. A lot of tourists from a lot of different states have trampled through the Resort. Is it enough that more people associate the name "Green Harbor" with Yarmouth than with Marshfield?

I'd love to see a feud, but it probably won't go down that way. My vote is with Marsh Vegas.

Since we're trying to start fights, why not throw a good one up in the mix?

Is Wareham part of Cape Cod?

We'll let both sides speak.

No: Mainland side of the Canal, more thug-life than any Cape town (including Barnstable), and did I mention that they are on the wrong side of the Canal? Bourne's membership in the Cape Cod Club is sometimes questioned, and Wareham is west of Bourne.

Yes: They have that Gateway sign, they have a Cape League team, they have a sizable summer community, they bear the Cape's traffic and they market heavily to sell that Cape vibe.

Many years ago, Wareham was on the team. You got off the highway in Wareham, and crawled through the tourist traps and clam shacks to the Cape. Wareham, with miles of coast and lakefront space, claimed many tourist dollars on their own.

Duxbury and Marion have Summer People population, but they don't weigh as heavily on the affairs of the town as they do in Wareham... and Cape Cod.

I think that, prior to to the highway being extended to the bridge, Wareham was Cape Cod. Now, I'm not so sure.

We've still got some foliage runs left in us

I think that Cape Cod's foliage peaks in November, perhaps even mid-November in some places. We're driving out there either Thursday or Friday to see where the local color is.

We have a larger article coming up about a Foliage Project, but I need to talk to someone who owns a tree farm.

It'll be cool, trust me.

Ironically, the Kingston Water Department is in this building.

Shooting foliage on cloudy days is tough, but if the wind is calm, you can go All In on shooting houses reflecting in water.

Lemons, Lemonde, babe...

I really love the Monponsett Inn's swan benches, but they're bolted down.

Maybe I should make a Turkey Bench...

Good luck this month, Gobbler...

Turkeys that you see around here in December are usually cocky and uppity.

You would be too, if you'd just dodged the cemetery. It catches up to all of us eventually, however.

Leftover spooky graveyard pic... check.

I may have included it in the Halloween article series, I'm not sure.

Speaking of Halloween...

A friend (Jaime Bedford) posted this on FB, I stole it, and I plan to tell her about the publication of it ex post facto. She's a home slice, she should be OK.

This was a house on Duxbury Beach. This picture was taken the day after the Perfect Storm/Halloween Gale stopped beating up the neighborhood in 1991.

It is famous locally for a cool legend. The owner came down before the storm and had a glass of beer. He or she (not sure which Bedford it was, Jaime is a new Bedford) left that glass- unfinished- on the table you can barely see through the door.

Th storm lifted the house up and washed it back about a first down or so from where the photographer was standing. 10 foot storm waves battered it back and forth, hither and yon.

The glass did not spill.

For an added bonus story.... I was standing about where the men in that photo were standing when the Bedfords came down to see how their cottage fared in the Gale. Power and phone lines were down, so they may have not known exactly how bad it was, or even known that the house had been wrecked. Sh*t like that happened before the Internet, kids.

I was perfectly positioned to see their First Impressions. Their expressions were horror meets awe. Iraqis probably had the same look during the WMD War. My house was wrecked, too... I had the same look.

Let's end on a happier note.

Pimping Plympton!

We have a large coverage area. We include Plymouth, Brockton, Barnstable, New Bedford, Fall River and Taunton in this area. None of those are Shanghai or London, but they are rather large when compared with Duxbury, Acushnet or Truro.

Plympton (pop. 2800 or so) is also much smaller than New Bedford or Brockton. Plympton is furthermore much smaller than Duxbury or Falmouth. It is Small Town, even by Small Town standards. I think of Plympton as a small town, and I live in a village of 4000 people.

However, the roads we travel making this website have led us to Plympton many times recently. We've been here for Halloween decorations, fall foliage, cranberry bogs and harvest festivals. I haven't had to even get near Fall River when doing these articles, which are admittedly rural in nature.

We'll use today's article to thank little Plympton for hosting us!

Plympton, once you dot the i's and cross the t's, is sort of the October capital of Southeastern Massachusetts. We recognize that the state champ is Salem, and that the reasoning is sound.

However, Plympton is as rural as eastern Massachusetts gets.

For 11 months of the year, there really is nothing there. I don't fear insulting Plympton residents by saying that, because I think that those people like it this way.

Some People Like Cities, or even the just-off-a-highway ease of a bedroom suburb. Some People, to put it simply, Don't.

I had time to kill with five students once when I was teaching. I got them on Mapquest, which was more of a novelty at the time. We were going to Halifax for a class fishing trip, so I thought I'd have them recognize the region a bit before they went.

While doing this, the kids- who were all from Dorchester and Cambridge and so forth- remarked on how sparsely populated the region is. I gave them the "people there like it that way" explanation that I used a few paragraphs ago. This led to a discussion where all of these city kids who live in tenement buildings with 500 people in them were pretty much united in their belief that the country people might be on to something with this trees-as-neighbors philosophy.

They phrased it more colorfully. "That's the kind of sh*t where Jason jumps out with the axe," said one. Another, who I'd gather had seen The Beverly Hillbillies opening at least once, thought that you could discover oil by shooting into the ground there.

Just for laughs, I had them zoom around on the map some, to try to find the Most Isolated Guy In The Region. I don't want to out the guy- whom it is safe to assume is a man who wishes to enjoy his privacy- but he lives in Plympton.

We did a few trips to Plympton in October. As opposed to, say, March, October holds plenty of reasons for someone to visit Plympton.

We hit Billingsgate Farm in early October. They are somewhat famous, as they are off Route 106 on the road from the Plymouth area to the Bridgewater area. Any commuting Bridgewater State College University kid from Duxbury or Marshfield probably spent some time rolling down 106.

We popped in to get some fresh produce (we like buying local when we can), and we also got a pumpkin. We were psyched to find that they had a pumpkin patch, a corn maze and all sorts of other stuff that you don't get to see in normal suburbia.

They also have a hay ride for the kids, which is something every kid should do at dusk as Halloween nears.

You can kind of see why people like Plympton just by looking around the fringes of the farm stand area.

Plympton has a lot of farms. You can spend several weekends during the Harvest Season banging around Plympton. I know this because I have spent several of the last few weekends banging around Plympton.

Even if you never get out of the car, Plympton is cool to drive though. This, early November, is the end of the foliage season in this part of the state.

If you do get out of the car, you have a lot of options. One of the better ones is Sauchuk Farm. Sauchuk is a working corn farm that doubles as a harvest theme park.

We were there on Halloween, just before they closed and we went trick or treating.

Sauchuk Farm rules if you are a kid. You have several awesome options. This is after you soak in farmland as far as the eye can see.

My kid liked the corn maze, part of which is visible in the picture above. We got deep in it without ever finishing, as we went out the same way we went in. We cheated, but we got to the elevated part for some panorama shots.

Estimates for maze-completion ranged from an hour to 30 minutes (with help), but I bet that we could have got 90-150 minutes if we continued to let the 8 year old be the head navigator.

We also liked the Corn Cannon, which is a deluxe potato-launcher thing they use to fire corn cobs 50 yards into the field. If you hit the furthest target, you get a pumpkin!

They had a food tent with fried dough, kettle corn and hot dogs, among other things. Eat there AFTER going on the bouncy house thing (no walls nor roof, not a house, but I don't know what you call it otherwise), if you know what's good for you.

They had a hay ride sort of thing that went out to the pumpkin patch. We didn't get that ride, as we arrived sort of late and decided to instead get lost in the corn maze. We also did the duck races, where the ducks are powered by hand pumps.

Of course they had a cow train, as any self-respecting farm should.

We could have spent a year there, as long as we didn't have to do the farm work. Farmers have a hard life, and I probably serve the world best here, entertaining.

We had to split, however. We had trick-or-treating to do, and the place shuts down at 6. Farmers go to bed early, so to better be up before the sun. Circadian cycle, or whatever they call that. That corn doesn't hoe itself, or whatever you do to corn.

We got one last shot before we split.

We spent Devil's Night in Plympton, as well.

We were invited to Snow Family Farm by Lindsay Snow herself, whose family was hosting their 24th annual Halloween party for the neighborhood. For the high price of nothing at all, they park you, feed you, light up a bonfire and take the kids on a haunted hayride. No one even came close to asking me for money.

My favorite part of this was the bonfire. Actually bonfires, plural. They had some steel drums with various Halloween stuff carved into them.

We'll end with those, because it's November 2nd and I really need to let go of my love for Halloween. We have Fall Foliage and Cranberry Bogs to shoot.

Thanks, Plympton!

Halloween Displays IV, and A Rich Man/Poor Man Comparative Analysis

(EDITOR'S NOTE: We lifted this article from a site we used to write for, and it dates back to 2012. "2012" explains why we planned to egg Taylor Swift's house, as she had then been smitten with Konnor Kennedy and had bought a house adjoining the Kennedy Compound. She has since divested herself from both entities. 

Also, my kid was Wolverine that year, he's a stormtrooper this year. 

The pictures in the article, aside from being Halloween-themed, have nothing to do with the story.

This article is the fourth installment in our Halloween Displays series, and the pictures come from Whitman, Hanson, Halifax, Plympton, Carver, Wareham and Plymouth.)

One way to make a childish activity fun for Mom and Dad is to use your child as the bait in a half-assed sociological experiment. This Halloween, we did just that.

He didn't care. He got to dress like Wolverine, and he hauled in enough candy to bring a dentist to climax.

The experiment was thus: Take a kid trick or treating in two neighborhoods of varying wealth, and try to take note of any differences that might make themselves apparent.

We had to choose two neighborhoods. Mommy had the Whammy, an absolute veto.... which eliminated Brockton, Roxbury, etc... and some pre-Halloween recon eliminated the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port when we found that no one but the staff was around there after Labor Day. 

Let the record show that I would have had No Problem At All with egging Taylor Swift's house if she didn't show my people some proper confectionary love. Fortunately, it never came down to that.

The Kennedy logic also eliminated many of the marquee Cape Cod neighborhoods. We have nothing but love for Summer People, but they aren't of much use when you need candy in late October. Demographics are everything. We needed more of a bedroom community, and a wealthy one at that.

We narrowed it down to Jersusalem Road in Cohasset, and Washington Street in Duxbury. Even though Cohasset's main drag has more of a Gatsby feel, Duxbury had the advantage of centralized parking (we used what most locals still call "Sweetser's") and more occupied houses per square mile. The average house goes about a milly or so, and you can bang out a bunch of them without walking a costumed 10K.

As for our seedy site, we chose Wareham. We wanted to use Shangri-La, but the sidewalk/streetlight ratios didn't work out in favor of those with a wandering five year old Wolverine. We decided instead on a trailer park between Mazzilli's Farm Stand and Barnacle Bill's Seafood Shack. The double-wides are too tightly packed to get a car moving through at any kill-a-child speed, and we could do 50 units without any great hardship.

Your average home on Washington Street is owned by someone in the finance industry. Your average person in the trailer park works at Benny's or the Lobster Pound. The average salary on Washington Street is probably equal to the salary of 20 people in the trailer park. The average salary in the trailer park is probably half or a third of what the kid's car costs on Washington Street.

Does it matter? Does it translate into generous candy giving?

Due to us having to pick Mommy up in Sagamore at a certain time, Wolverine and I decided to start in the Wareham trailer park. We got out a little before dark, and we set right to our task. Wolverine (the Michigan yellow/blue Wolverine from the comics, not the leather jacket one from the movies) is five, cute, and fully invested in the candy acquisition process.

In case you think that this article is going to make fun of the poor... don't. Wareham came correct. I'm proud to say that every trailer we knocked on answered, and nobody came cheap with the goodies. Wolverine didn't have to disembowel anyone with his kid-sized adamantium claws due to Grinchy candy withholding.

The only standout facet was that some of the candy was of the cheap variety, a la individual Starbursts, Dum Dum lollipops, and the small solo generic Reese's cups with the gold foil. This was offset by the fact that they gave it out in great amounts. Besides, in this economy, and in that neighborhood, we should have been (and were) happy to get anything.

Some of the trailers were decorated, and some weren't. I may have seen 5 pumpkins... not bad, until you remember that the park is next to a farm stand. Hay bales, corn stalks, scarecrows and various gourds were easily available 20 feet away. I suppose that if a poor neighborhood has to skimp somewhere, they should skimp on decor rather than candy.

Finally, and this is important.... Wareham residents are cool enough to hook up the Elders with a beer now and then. One must be properly fortified when taking the kids about. I even was offered a bong hit, but that doesn't really count because I knew the guy. Either way, my bibulous handouts are important to me, I'm the judge/author, and they factor into the analysis.

I wasn't 100% shocked by the results. I had no concrete reason to think that Wareham would fail to be rewarding. Nothing really jumped out about the candy to cancel the theory one of my friends put forth that "Everyone shops at Wal-Mart."

We were working against the clock, so Wolverine and I hopped into the Benz a bit after sunset, picked up Mommy, and hauled our candy asses up Route 3 into Duxbury.

Now, the wealthy don't have all the advantages when being stalked by a trick or treat posse with a purpose. For instance, wealthy people's houses are farther apart than trailer park homes are. We probably covered 10 trailers in the time it took us to walk up the driveway of the first house we hit on Washington Street. For Duxbury to shame Wareham, the candy-per-step ratio would have to be amazing.

Also, Duxbury residents may or may not have been aware that they were a part of an experiment. They also most likely don't share my view of their role as Giver in the Redistribution Of Wealth theory I was aiming for, as they were more likely to assume that whoever was knocking on the door in costume was just another wealthy person from a nearby neighborhood.

I use the ambiguity because Washington Street has a go-to rep among local trick or treaters, and the residents there may feel an urge towards overkill. We were among 200 or so people trick or treating Washington Street during the hours that we were operating... not too shabby for a town with 15000 people at about 45% elderly.

Here's Duxbury, in a few bullet points.

- There were probably 50-100 yards between houses, if you count the walkways and so forth.

- Every door was opened by a grandparent or a trophy wife. There was one Yummy Mommy at the end of Fort Hill Road who actually could have not handed out candy and just used "You got to look at me up close" as an egging deterrent argument.

- I didn't think that people still put bags of candy unguarded outside of their door with a "Take One Per Person, Please" sign on it. People in 4400 sq. ft bayfront houses do, however.

- People hand out the full size candy bars in Duxbury. Those rich folk gave it up smooth.

- Not only do you get the name brand goods, but you also get the more rare stuff... Caramellos, Hilliards, Pop Rocks, Fun Dip, Flake Bars and so forth. You know... the good sh*t.

- No one handed out money, but it happened a few times during my youth in that area.

- Many residents had the same variety bowl of candy that the Wareham folks did, probably most.

-  One house- and I swear I'm not making this up- had a video screen set up in front of the doorway. The homeowner was able to hide in the house and speak to us through the video screen, which showed a Grim Reaper sort of visage. The Reaper spoke whatever the homeowner said. He also had music going through a loudspeaker, which made his house sound like a nightclub from 100 yards away.

But wait...there's more.

He also set something up where horror film images were holographed onto the house itself, so you'd turn around and be facing a 15 foot Wicked Witch. To offset this, he had his daughter and MILF wife outside, distributing the actual candy.

I'd say he spent about $3500 or so on the electronics, and that may be a conservative estimate.

- Beers were not offered in Duxbury. This was not through rudeness. Every cop in Duxbury was on Washington Street, to the point where I would have been able to discharge firearms on other streets with total impunity had I chosen to do so. Public drinking was out of the question.

- People in Duxbury hand out toys, coloring books, Pez dispensers, crayons, toothbrushes, McDonald's coupons, cheap sunglasses and so forth.

Overall, I'd score them about equally candy-wise, with Duxbury enjoying a huge edge in decorations. Duxbury had enough people handing out full-sized candy bars to offset the greater distances between houses. Wareham people are giving enough by nature to offset the median household income differences.

Wolverine did ridiculously well. That bag of candy you see at the top of the article is what was left today, about five days after Halloween, after several sessions where the adults had at it, and after a children's birthday party. The goody bag was full enough that Wolverine was having trouble carrying it at the end of the session.

We'd have had more, but Wolverine likes lollipops. When offered a bowl full of large Snickers bars and lollipops, he'd grab 2 tiny lollipops instead. I actually had to intervene when he chose a Dum Dum pop over a full Milky Way bar... "He wants one of these, too."

I'm just happy that Trick or Treating hasn't faded away to oblivion like Christmas Carols or whatever. That day is probably coming, and the world will be less exciting when it happens.

Halloween Decorations, Part I 

Halloween Decorations Part II 

Halloween Decorations Part III

Halloween Displays, Part III

Yeah, that isn't a good start....

I told you that we had a lot of material, and here comes a pile of it.

We surveyed Facebook, got some leads, followed up on them, and here's what we came up with. We'll have a few more issues before Halloween plays itself out this Saturday night.

Be sure to check out Part One and Part Two, if you wish.

We ran from Rochester to Whitman and then back South through Hanson, Halifax, Plympton, Carver and Plymouth.

We still have Duxbury and Cape Cod to go through. The weather cost us today and maybe tomorrow, and we may do Duxbury while we're trick-or-treating there.

Duxbury gets their own day, because we know a guy there who might be spending $5K on decorations, and we get full-size Snickers and so forth all up and down Washington Street.

The winds of today's storm may cost us our foliage hunting, which we will take up in earnest on November 1st. The South Coast and Cape Cod turn around then, anyhow.

Halloween is a pagan ritual, adopted by the Romans, modified to fit Christianity, imported from Europe and perfected by America.

Halloween celebrations were banned in colonial New England, as the Puritan forefathers weren't fans of pagan, superstitious celebrations. Halloween was the night before a solemn Holy day. Remember, these were people who frowned on Christmas, because it was too Church-like.

An influx of Irish immigrants helped popularize the Halloween traditions in America, and the traditions have held on to our present day.

It soon became primarily a children's holiday, although it is more of a children-of-all-ages thing.

No irony intended, I just had to shoot over a car.

America spent 6 billion dollars celebrating Halloween in 2010, and that was at the height of the Great Recession.  That ranks it 7th among money spent on American holidays, just behind Father's Day at #6 and way behind #1 Christmas at $130 billion.

There are more kids than fathers in America, but you can't handle Dad with two mini Kit Kat bars. You have to at least buy him a tie or something. That adds up.

Kids make it up at Christmas. It's a kid's world, we're just running it for them.

Most Popular Halloween Costumes, according to Google Trends and CNN:

#1, Harley Quinn

#2 Star Wars

#3 Superhero (Non Superman, Non Avenger...generic, Villain or Other, see #5,9,10)

#4 Pirate

#5 Batman

#6 Minnie Mouse

#7 Witch

#8 Minion

#9 Joker

#10 Wonder Woman

My Own Top 5 Halloween Shows/Movies/Stories

- It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

My personal favorite, also the source of the worst overdub video of all time.

- Halloween

I prefer the Carpenter one to the White Zombie one, but I am just one lonesome columnist.

- The Nightmare Before Christmas

I've never seen it, and I'm not sure this is even a  Halloween movie, but it seems to be everywhere, so we'll throw it up in the mix.

- The Fat Albert Halloween Special

The Cosby mansion is now the Worst Place To Trick Or Treat in Hollywood.

- The Legend Of Sleepy Hollow

You can't deny the Headless Horseman his spot, he's sort of like Halloween's Santa Claus.

Films That Involve Halloween But Aren't Halloween Films

- To Kill A Mockingbird climaxes on Halloween, which is a sinister sentence to say about pre-teen Scout Finch.

- Arsenic And Old Lace has a Halloween wedding

- Regina steals Cady's BF at a Halloween party in Mean Girls

- The Exorcist, while not a Halloween film, was set in Halloween season.

- You know that Ernest Scared Stupid isn't set on Arbor Day, payer.

Worst Halloween Specials

- The Lou Grant Halloween Episode

- The Paul Lynde Halloween Special

- The Fall Guy "October The 32d" episode

- The Dukes Of Hazzard, "The Hazzardville Horror" episode

- The Smurfs, "The Legend Of Smurfy Hollow"

- Fraggle Rock, "The Terrible Tunnel."

We'll get a few more articles in before Halloween, thanks for checking us out!