Every Christmas there's a bunch of complaining from our more religious compatriots about how secularists are trying to take the 'Christ' out of Christmas, getting nativity scenes banned from public property, bullying Wal-Mart employees into saying "Happy Holidays" and generally trying to redirect the holiday away from what they think it stands for.

But if Christmas has been taking a battering from the forces of cultural dilution and blandification, think about how much worse the assault on Halloween is. Christmas only has secularists, Jews, Muslims, Kwanzaites (or whatever) and a few Pagans after it. All of them are after Halloween and so are the soccer moms and just about every brand of Christianity you can imagine.

Of course, the emasculators are everywhere these days and they seem to be driving minivans with their kids' names in the back windows. A few years ago they took over the Field Day I started at our kid's school and took all the competitive sports activities and turned them into 'participatory' games where everyone got a ribbon just for taking part. The soccer moms felt all warm and fuzzy about it and the kids who were old enough to tie their own shoes wandered around wondering what the hell the point of it all was.

Now they're homogenizing Halloween the same way. They're renaming school Halloween carnivals the 'fall festival'. At my kid's school and several others they've renamed their Halloween events the 'Howl', which I wish represented a resurgence of werewolf chic, but actually seems to be an effort to remove the name 'Halloween' from the event because of both its Christian and pagan associations. Today they're more concerned about urban legends of razor blades in apples than they are about preserving tradition, so they've got trick-or-treating in the mall with free x-raying for your candy. Nothing says Halloween like lining up by the x-ray machine.

Let's be straight here. The harvest festival is a pagan tradition which goes back a hell of a lot farther than Christianity. Spring's Easter used to celebrate life with people rutting in the fields and Fall was the celebration of death, a time for raising spirits, jumping over bonfires and blood sacrifices to the harvest god. The dead walked abroad, the gates of hell yawned wide, jack-o-lanterns were put out to drive away evil spirits, and children were sent out in the night to see who the gods would choose as their blood offering.

Halloween is supposed to be scary. It's a cultural ritual about confronting and learning from your fears, and it's a link to a tradition which goes back to the time that the first caveman looked out into the darkness and defied it with fire. Halloween was all our fears through all our history wrapped up and encapsulated in one glorious day every year. Now they want to make it about dressing up like your favorite ECW wrestler or who's the prettiest Disney princess. Sometimes Halloween used to be just a little scary. Now it's safe and dull and depressing.