Halloween is my hubby’s favorite holiday (although he does love Christmas even if he complains I go overboard lol). He’s got 3 bins of creepy decorations at this point and every year we add to his piles of stuff. I am especially excited about the bloody gel handprints I found to stick in our front window. So delightfully gross. We’ve also acquired, from our local Dollarama, a ferocious looking plastic rat with red eyes and fanglike teeth, a rope with styrofoam skulls and a new plaque that reads ‘Unload the dead bodies at he back.’ Lol. Gotta love Halloween.

Still on the list to do, other than decorate the day before, is hit the pumpkin farm where we will visit the smelly animals and listen to the kids giggle because they saw something poop. Scream in disgust as the cow eats a corn on the cob from our hands and slimes us. Run wild through the twelve foot tall corn maze (which I’ll admit, even in daylight, is kind of freaky). Ooh and watch the cannon launch pumpkins to explode in the field. The kids love watching the splatter. Okay, I’ll admit it, I enjoy it too Then there’s the wagon ride into the field itself where my son and hubby hunt for the biggest freakn’pumpkin they can find. My oldest daughter looks for a large but perfectly round one. Then there’s the little one who grabs one, declares it’s perfect, then puts it down, then grabs another, then changes her mind. This goes on for a while. Me, I get a small, green striped one that I can carry easily along with the little one’s once she settles on the perfect one.

Carving is an all afternoon affair, with hubby diving in right alongside the kids creating masterpieces. The children like to follow a paper pattern, but my hubby loves to get inventive. For several years, we had the puking pumpkin, always a hit. Last year, we had the pooping pumpkin sitting on a potty hubby built replete with toilet paper, and a fresh pie crust courtesy of me. Ooh, and a pig pureed pile of pumpkin mush right under our pumpkins butt in the pie shell. The sign of course read ‘Fresh Pumpkin Pie’. Perhaps not original, but damn did we laugh our faces off.

Another tradition too, that I follow courtesy of my paranoid mother, is the sorting of the candy bags once they get home. Despite my not understanding it, people still do nasty things to kids candy instead of turning off their porch light. So every year, I dump that candy out and I look for things that are unwrapped, homemade, or just plain weird looking. Those get trashed. Then I pull out the stuff my kids won’t eat, that languish in the cupboard. I yank the bowl of good candy I bought for trick-or-treaters and replace it with the stuff my kids hate lol. I know, horrible of me. Anybody else do that?

One of these years I hope I can get over my self consciousness and actually dress up for the occasion. I’d love to be one of those parents who dons the wig, makeup and outfit, embarrassing their kids royally. LOL, seems like so much fun if I wasn’t such a wussy. While it won’t happen this year, maybe it will the next.

What about you? Are you doing anything special for Halloween? Do you have any traditions? And is it just in Canada that the porch light rule exists?

I don’t mean to me personally (although I’ve read some really nasty reviews that make my brows raise and make me go “WTF?”) I am talking about the anonymous meanness exhibited on the internet in the form of comments left on newspaper articles, blogs and even Facebook. I’m sure you’ve seen it.

If our city paper runs an article on a tragic accident where a child dies, there’s people screaming the parents should be charged and put to death, and that the parents deserved it for not being glued to the child’s side every second of the day. Where’s the sympathy for the grieving family? Are people so morally bankrupt they think that’s okay?

A celebrity is caught cheating, and cruel jokes about the victimized spouse emerge about them not being good enough hence why the other had to stray. Really? Because the commenters obviously know first hand what’s going on in that relationship, fter all, it is so everybody’s business. Not!

Politicians do their double speak and nasty threats about what they’d like to do to them are rampant and gruesome. Sure, those in office lie, but still, are we that savage that those kind of violent remarks are acceptable? You don’t like who’s running your city/province/country? Then try voting instead.

The examples of intentional cruelty are staggering and everywhere. It’s appalling.

Don’t, get me wrong, I also see beautiful things on the internet, supportive messages for families dealing with loss or hardship, and a whole lot of love. But unfortunately, the rabid screaming a of a few, who seem to think the anonymity of the internet gives them the right to spill their vitriol, makes it unpleasant especially when you need to wade through so much of it to read the real comments left by people who still have moral values.

I’ve been on the internet a long, long time now, from back when I used a modem to dial in and I got a feeble connection to use an AltaVista search that took a while for a few hundred results. Years later, I’m still a huge internet fan, loving the ability to discover at the tip of my fingers. But the greater and wider spread the internet becomes, the more I’m seeing hate, and not just hate, but pointless, evil remarks against even the most innocent of things. Why? When did manners stop applying? When did it become alright to ridicule and even ridicule someone’s grief? I don’t care who you think you are, it’s never all right when you read an article about a child suiciding from bullying to read a remark saying the kids was a loser and did the right thing. WTF?! Seriously. What is wrong with these people?

I know it’s not something we can fix. Some people will always feel entitled to speak their mind whether what they say has any worth or not, with no regard for the feelings of others, and this is why I try so carefully to monitor my own children’s usage of the internet. Why I attempt at every turn to teach them to treat others like they want to be treated. To know that whenever they post something on line, it’s there forever, and there are always consequences to their words and actions.

Unfortunately, there seem to be thousands of people out there who never had a parent or guardian or even a friend who cared enough to teach them right from wrong. That’s so sad. I’m sure some of those same bullies will read this and have some choice words for me just proving my point. Will it make them feel happier for doing it? Maybe, because for them, causing someone misery gives them pleasure. I wonders how they’d feel if the tide turned and the crap they liked to spread comes back to cover them. One can only hope.

Have you seen the cyber bullying and meanness? Have you ever had it directed at you? How do you deal with it? Me, I hit delete, but I’m worried about my kids. Especially my oldest. She’s at that fragile time in her life where every word has meaning, whether true or not. I need to protect her self esteem, but how do I do that without curtailing all her internet privileges? Is it even possible anymore to protect our children without taking away the very technology that makes todays world so interesting?

A worried mom wants to know.