It’s Halloween once again, and we are bombarded and showered with cheap, artificially intelligently..or unintelligently..designed products. Pick your store, whether it’s TJ Maxx, some other retail location of your finest choosing, or maybe even Spirit Halloween. Everything feels and looks the same now.

We’re not saying the excitement of Halloween is gone. Or maybe we are.

But gone are the sitcoms featuring the Halloween specials, and gone are the commercials on TV that we collectively watched together during the NBC, ABC, or CBS television premiere of a horror movie that bleeped out the cusses and boobs and replaced them with extra scenes or awkward edits.

Even Charlie Brown himself can barely find an audience for his Great Pumpkin anymore.

Everything is cyclical, and times move on. And now we’ve moved on to a period of time in which Halloween itself seems to almost be a mockery of itself. A time when Freddy Krueger, a fictional character, could be actively canceled online by people, but that same crowd is jokingly saying that because Halloween falls on a Saturday, this weekend should be dubbed “Swalloween.”

The crudest of jokes from the cancelist of people.

We all know the roots of Halloween go back to Samhain, to the festivals of darkness, to the Celts. And we all know that, as time has gone on, Christians have often decried the season and tried to replace its darker traditions with souls and saints in the days right after.

In the past, however, even though we all know it’s probably, kind of, sort of, maybe just fiction, it did slightly feel like the in-between of here and there drifted, and another world became one with ours.

The veil thinned on Halloween night.

And when we were kids, we kind of felt that.

The magic in the air of running door to door has become over-glamorized by nostalgia. It wasn’t always that great, because by the time we got home, our parents were frightened and paranoid that our candy would have knives in it or poison in it.

If you grew up in the ’80s, those were the same parents who didn’t care where you were until you came home after sunset or the streetlights came on.

Apparently, those commercials on TV asking where their children were at 10:00 hit them hard enough on Halloween that they suddenly worried the candy would kill us.

This post is a bit meandering, but so is life. And so is Halloween.

You see, there’s no real theme to Halloween anymore. There’s no real purpose to any of it. It’s becoming digitally washed away by the future.

Look! It’s a computer.

One of these years, it will be the last Halloween we celebrate. You know that, right?

There won’t be a need for it at some point.

Just like the modern image of Santa Claus, with his red suit and white beard, became cemented in popular culture through advertising, Halloween will evolve into something else.

Trick-or-treating already did.

It took about a decade, but trunk-or-treat now reigns supreme in many places.

For the safety.

The safety.

In a time when kids are safer than ever before in so many ways, we worry more about danger. When a population has more medical advances and protections than ever before, we’re afraid of sickness. And when a society is filled with the artificial light of computers like no other time in history, we ignore the darkness.

We ignore the darkness of what’s to come, and the death of all seasons when we face our own personal Armageddon at the end of our lives.

And that’s perhaps mostly why we have always feared Halloween.

Because when the veil thins and the other world comes here, it reminds us that we will be on the other side one day.

No matter what that other side is.

And no artificial light from a computer, AI prompt, or trunk with treats in it will save us from that.

Happy Halloween 2026.