I realize this is late, but oh well.

I don't know how things are going in regards to Halloween elsewhere in the world, but currently, it's as good as dead in the Sydney/New Waterford area of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia that I live in. Nova Scotia is a Canadian province, in case you didn't know.

First of all, you wouldn't have known it was Halloween for several reasons: there was little to no hype about it through any popular medium (as far as I could gather); next to no houses were decorated for the holiday at all, and the ones that were hardly left any impression whatsoever; and from what I noticed, stores and other shopping areas weren't too big on decorating either. You could walk down any given street and the only thing you'd be able to reasonably verify, by the accumulation of leaves and the colours of the trees, is that it was fall and probably October.

In a recent poll conducted by my local newspaper, 50% voted "1-10" on the question, "How many trick-or-treaters visited your house on Halloween?" That's sad. That's beyond sad. That's like if sorrow had a bad day right there. One to ten people throughout the whole night? Unfortunately, if doesn't show how many people voted in this poll, but regardless, that's a depressing bit of statistic. It seems to be in accordance with what me and some of my friends observed on the night; we drove from New Waterford to Sydney to pick up some fast-food and along the way, we observed about a maximum of five trick-or-treaters. My number may not be perfect, but it's close enough. Some of the poor kids looked lonely and downright lost (most of them were, in fact, alone).

Trying to forget all of this depressive reality, we returned home and I set about continuing to watch horror movies (which was what I had planned on doing that night). We watched Steven King's "It," Creepshow, and Zombieland, which are all fantastic movies. I had wanted to watch a lot more that night, but things happen.

When it started getting late, around two or three in the morning, we all staggered out of the bedroom and into the living room to watch Scream, which someone noticed was on. We were all fairly tired at that point. Then a commercial appeared. Do you know what kind of commercial it was? Don't have to guess, do you? It's pretty obvious. Yes, that's right: it was a Christmas commercial. Quite literally, as soon as they possibly could, they aired a Christmas commercial. What's worse is that this particular commercial actually jokingly downplayed Halloween by being some weird hybrid of it and Christmas with an obvious promotion of the latter. It was disgusting, basically.

But the fun wasn't over yet -- oh no. A few days ago I went with my mother over to Supervalue (a chain of decently-sized superstores) to pick a few things up, and low and behold: Christmas decorations were set up all over the place and even Christmas-like music was playing. I was pissed and it instantly soured my mood. However, I gritted my teeth long enough to get through the ordeal, and in doing so, was able to spot a location off to the side near the entrance reserved for, what else, Halloween materials. Absolutely appalling, to say the least.

The moral of the story: Halloween is thrown to the side, ignored by the trampling feet of Christmas and apathetic people of all ages, while Christmas enjoys an undeservedly lengthened life starting from the moment Halloween is declared over by curfew standards.

That's not really a moral at all, but yeah. I have extreme difficulty caring for Christmas now. It doesn't help that my mother adores it and already has her decorations up.