There's a war on Halloween, which I can prove by exaggerating a few isolated, inconsequential examples. This year, as Nick Gillespie wrote on Time.com the principal of Inglewood Elementary, near Philadelphia, cited separation of church and state in canceling school celebrations, though he later reversed his decision. Gloucester County, New Jersey, passed a resolution to cancel Halloween, though it turned out the county was just issuing safety tips. Still, there are a few schools in Portland, Ore., and others in Skokie, Ill.; San Jose, Calif.; Mechanicsburg, Pa.; Winnipeg, Manitoba; and Port Colborne, Ontario, that have definitely canceled Halloween. And we Americans who care about tradition, family and Canada have to fight back.
We cannot let them steal a hallowed tradition that, admittedly, combines three things that should never be mixed together: cute kids, horror and women dressed provocatively. So just like Sarah Palin, whose new book is called Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas, I will--if the markets dictate--write Boo! How Liberals Scared Us Into Abandoning Halloween as well as a similar book called Boo! How Conservatives Scared Us Into Abandoning Halloween. The right is attacking Halloween because it thinks paganism is anti-Christian. The left hates it because it forces poor kids to buy costumes; or a lot of candy has peanuts, which some kids are allergic to; or it takes time away from education; or it scares some children. Figuring out why liberals do things is really hard.
To get my war on, I got advice from John Gibson, the Fox News Radio host and author of the 2005 book The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. Gibson knew so little about the war on Halloween that he thought it was being waged by dentists worried about tooth decay. So he officially handed me the "war on" baton. "I went out of the 'war on' business a few years ago," he said. "I moved on to other idiocies." He suggested that I appeal to the very young, who are not yet war weary. "You have to go to the Twitter feeds of 8- and 10-year-olds."
I figured if 8 was good, 4 was twice as good. So I asked my 4-year-old son Laszlo what kids whose principals aren't letting them dress up for Halloween should do. "They should just get out of that school," he said. "Then they'll just close that school, and everybody will go to a different school." I have never heard a better argument for school choice. Laszlo even wanted to send those unfortunate kids some of his candy. "I'm going to keep all the chocolate, but maybe people will give me lollipops, and I'm going to send those to them." I've never heard a better argument against giving lollipops as Halloween candy.
To help defend Halloween, I enlisted Cerridwen Fallingstar, a priestess and shamanic witch who lives in Marin County, California, and has founded three different covens. Taking away Halloween is like denying her entire life. Luckily, she has a lot of past lives that she writes books about, but still, it's not nice.