It’s a simple thing.

You dress up.

You get candy.

I’ll bet living in a nudist camp takes a lot of the fun out of Halloween.

Halloween is an odd time of the year.

It’s a time of year when we notice that there are three kinds of ogres &045; the good ogres, the bad ogres and the mediogres.

We remember the haunted house at the end of a dead end street and the neighbor kid who was going to go as a skeleton, but overslept.

He was a real lazy bones.

Halloween is when birds go trick-or-tweeting.

My mother never liked me to go trick-or-treating.

She was worried that I might fall in with a bad crowd

&045; political candidates.

My neighbor Crandall brought something to my attention.

He told me that unless I am the first one to bob for apples, I am actually bobbing for saliva. One year, a curmudgeonly neighbor gave Crandall Ex-Lax.

General unpleasantness followed.

Halloween is when we discover that demons are a ghoul’s best friend.

Halloween is a time that we feed our sugar habit.

Americans will eat $2 billion worth of Halloween candy this year.

It’s believed that 20 million pounds of candy corn is consumed.

The rest of the year, the material used to make candy corn is used to manufacture toilet seats and spatulas.

When it comes to Halloween, disguise the limit.

Halloween is the one day of the year that Crandall is sometimes well-dressed. Crandall taught me that going as a ghost was a bad idea.

One year, nature called and Crandall spent the rest of the evening with his sheet caught in his zipper.

It’s not easy being a ghost.

Another year Crandall wore a costume covered with small boxes of breakfast food that were punctured by plastic knives.

Yes, he went as a cereal killer.

It’s a time of the year when pumpkins are given extreme makeovers. A time when high-tech witches use vacuum cleaners to fly and lazy trick-or-treaters telephone homeowners and ask if they deliver.

My wife and I used to go as a horse each Halloween.

It was a nice costume and made us look like a real horse. She went as the head of the horse and I went as myself.

One year, I went as someone who was on a diet and I didn’t get any candy. Another year, I dressed up like a beer bottle and scared the Baptists.

I like the people who hand out pencils.

I like pencils better than I like chocolate.

There are better things to give than candy.

Batteries, flu vaccine and dental floss come to mind. Hand out menus to trick-or-treaters.

Give them some of your old bills.

Now I don’t have a cowardly bone in my body, but the meat around them is a little jumpy.

People enjoy being frightened.

It’s probably because one day the eek will inherit the earth.

I once watched a scary movie about Halloween.

I learned a lot from the movie. Never, I repeat, never get carried away and do any of these things on Halloween:

– Never dig up a grave &045; no matter how good the idea sounds.

– Never solve a puzzle that opens the portals of Hell.

– Never read a book of demon summoning out loud.

– Beware of any house made of food.

– Beware of strangers bearing chainsaws.

– Never go as a pinata.

Halloween is the biggest pizza delivery night of the year. It’s also the time of the year when a door that has creaked all year, suddenly becomes frightening.

I like going trick-or-treating.

It gives me a chance to see the Christmas decorations.

If you want to beat the rush, do your trick-or-treating in June.

Someone told me that you are never too old to go trick-or-treating, but I don’t believe that’s true.

If you have to have someone else chew your candy for you, you’re too old.

If you get winded from ringing the doorbell, you’re too old.

If you ask for high fiber candy only, you’re too old.

If you yell, &uot;Trick or…&uot; and can’t remember the rest, you’re too old.

I thought about going as a multi-colored Asian lady beetle, but I am afraid some homeowner would squash me. I could dress up like a tax cut and then never show up.

This year, I am not dressing up in a Halloween costume, but I am still going trick-or-treating.

I plan on scaring people out of all of their goodies.

As soon as someone opens the door, I am going to yell out gas prices.

(Hartland resident Al Batt writes a column for the Tribune each Wednesday and Sunday.)