Whichever Hallmark executive thought up Sweetest Day should be forced to sit in a room for two days watching reruns of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” (I can’t think of any worse punishment than that). What will they think up next, Christmas in the summer? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a hopeless romantic, but we already have Valentine’s Day, and besides, Sweetest Day is too close to one of the coolest holidays of the year: Halloween.

Where Christmas is like the Rolls Royce of holidays, Halloween is a jacked-up Camaro with flames painted on the sides and pink foam dice and garter belts hanging from the rear-view mirror. Halloween is pure fun. Anyone can love Halloween; you don’t have to be of a certain religion, or have a girlfriend or boyfriend, or be a florist or own a card shop, and it still has its own “Charlie Brown” special.

I remember when I was a kid, my brother and I would carve our pumpkins into gruesome faces, all while trying to get the most gooey pumpkin innards into each others’ hair. Meanwhile, my sister would be trying to carve a Snoopy face out of her pumpkin, although it always ended up looking more like Phyllis Diller. Not that it mattered to my friends and me. On November 1 we would still get up on our garage roof and toss it off to see it splatter.

When you’re a kid, the greatest thing about Halloween is trick-or-treating. Every year my parents would give us the standard “razor-blade-in-the-apple” speech, and tell us to be in early, and every year we would stay out as late as we could getting candy. The rest of the night we’d play ding-dong-ditch. When you’re 10, ding-dong-ditch is the funniest thing in the world, except of course for calling up people and asking “if there’s a John in the house.” When you get older, your comedy tastes become refined, and then you can understand great humor like watching Rob Lowe sing at the Emmys, or listening to President Bush say he’s going to balance the budget.

When I would arrive home, first I would have all of my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Nestle Crunch bars, and then work my way through the rest. By the end of the week my loot would all be gone except for Sweet Tarts and those generic gumballs and malted milk balls you get in the clear plastic wrappers.

One Halloween tradition everyone at any age can do is egg, dung-bomb, and toilet-paper someone’s house. No, just kidding, what I really meant to say is dress up in a scary costume, like a ghost, a vampire, or a tuition bill from NIU. It’s always fun dressing up in costume for Halloween; it’s something that’s fun whether you’re a first-grader or a senior in college. Haunted Houses are always a blast too, because if they don’t scare you, you can always have a fun time heckling the people in the costumes.

So, get out those cheesy plastic vampire teeth, watch “The Great Pumpkin,” don’t eat too many candy bars, have a funky Halloween, and until next week, be casual.