(And if you don’t like it, go hug a liberal pumpkin, you snowflake!)
Listen up, you candy-hoarding, fog-machine-fondling freaks of the night! It’s October 31, 2025, and here I am, hunkered down in my bunker with a shotgun loaded with rock salt and a bowl of plain old Hershey bars . The kind of bars that don’t come with gluten-free apologies or organic kale wrappers. Back when I was a sprout terrorizing the neighborhood in a bedsheet ghost costume held together by Mom’s safety pins and sheer spite.
Halloween was SIMPLE. It was kids in pillowcases banging on doors for Tootsie Rolls and Snickers, maybe a caramel apple if you were lucky and your dentist was drunk. We’d carve a lumpy pumpkin with a butcher knife, light it with a kitchen match, and call it a day. Ghosts? Real ones, the kind that rattled chains in the attic after too much moonshine. Costumes? Hand-me-downs from Uncle Mort’s garage sale of regrets. Total cost? A nickel and a prayer.
But NOOOOO! Not in 2025! Oh, heavens no! This ain’t your grandpappy’s All Hallows’ Eve anymore. It’s a bloated, bedazzled BEHEMOTH sucking the life out of your wallet faster than a vampire at a blood bank blood drive! Did you know this infernal holiday now rakes in TWENTY BILLION DOLLARS a year? That’s right, twenty BIG ones! More than the national debt of sanity in this godforsaken country! And who’s footing the bill? YOU, you gullible goon, shelling out for animatronic skeletons that moan “Trick or treat, smell my feet” in a robot voice programmed by some Silicon Valley snot-nose who thinks “spooky” means augmented reality filters on your iPhone that turn your cat into a zombie while it hacks up a hairball.
THEY’RE JACKING UP THE PRICE OF CANDY!
Take a gander out my window – if you dare, without your therapy dog and a safe space bubble. The Joneses down the street? They’ve turned their split-level into a full-blown HAUNTED HELLSCAPE! Giant inflatable spiders the size of Buicks dangling from drones, fog billowing thicker than the smoke from Biden’s last coherent thought, and laser lights shooting “BOO!” across the sky like it’s the Fourth of July gone goth. Little Timmy next door isn’t trick-or-treating with a flashlight and a paper sack. Oh no, he’s got a GPS-tracked wagon pulled by a robot dog that barks in binary code, programmed to avoid “triggering” peanuts or patriarchy.
And the candy? Forget full-size bars, patriots! It’s all “vegan ghost gummies” made from lab-grown regret and “fair-trade candy corn” harvested by underpaid elves in sustainable sweatshops. One bag costs more than my first car, and half of it melts in your hand before you can say “corporate greed”!
IT STARTS EARLY AND NEVER ENDS!
And don’t get me started on the GROWN-UPS, you costumed clowns! Halloween used to end at 9 p.m., when the streetlights flickered on and Ma hollered us inside for hot cocoa and a bedtime story about witches who actually got burned at the stake for good reason. Now? It’s a non-stop orgy of adulting gone wrong! Bars crammed with “sexy nurse” nurses who look like they moonlight at the North Pole’s red-light district, “zombie banker” bankers chugging pumpkin spice IPAs that taste like regret fermented in a hipster’s beard.
Parties? Forget bobbing for apples – it’s “bobbing for OnlyFans subscribers” in a kiddie pool of Jell-O shots! And the decorations? Folks are dropping five grand on “smart home haunts” where your Alexa screams obscenities at intruders and your fridge dispenses “blood” (it’s just beet juice, but at $12 a liter, it might as well be the elixir of youth). Climate change my left foot. This year’s “green Halloween” means solar-powered jack-o’-lanterns that charge your Tesla while guilt-tripping you about fossil fuels. Bah! In my day, we burned leaves for fun, and the only carbon footprint was from stomping on your sister’s toes during square dancing!
WORLDWIDE PUMPKIN MADNESS
Worse yet, this holiday’s gone global, you internationalist idiots! Kids in Tokyo are trick-or-treating in kimono-kaiju hybrids, while Paris turns the Eiffel Tower into a giant witch’s hat that lights up like it’s auditioning for Vegas. And here in America? We’re exporting our excess – shipping truckloads of plastic pumpkins to China so they can melt ’em down into more iPhones to spy on your candy selfies! It’s all tied together in a web of woke wickedness: “Inclusive” costumes that let you be a “non-binary Frankenstein’s monster” (whatever that means – probably just a bolt in your neck and pronouns on your tombstone), “sustainable” treats wrapped in recycled hypocrisy, and “zero-waste” parties where the only thing trickling down is the host’s plummeting property value from all the fake cobwebs clogging the gutters.
I tell ya, if Abraham Lincoln rose from the grave tonight – and with the way things are going, he might, just to slap some sense into us. He’d take one look at this spectacle and declare martial law on Martha Stewart’s craft catalog! We’d round up every inflatable Grim Reaper, every LED-lit cauldron, every “adult-sized” bunny onesie, and ship ’em straight to the Island of Misfit Commercialism where they belong. Bring back the basics, I say! Let the kids roam free with cap guns and war paint, no helmets required! Ditch the drone deliveries for door-to-door begging that builds character (and calluses)! And for Pete’s sake, if you’re over 12 and not handing out candy, stay inside with a Bible and a baseball bat. That’s the REAL Halloween spirit!
GHOSTS IN THEM SNICKERS!
So here’s my curse on you, 2025 Halloween horde: May your fog machine spew glitter that clogs your sinuses for a year! May your sexy pirate costume snag on every thorn bush from here to Hades! And may every last “spooktacular” sale end with a receipt longer than your regret! Turn off the lights, unplug the inflatables, and remember: True terror isn’t a jump-scare app – it’s waking up tomorrow realizing you’ve mortgaged your soul for a single Snickers that tastes like ashes. Happy freakin’ Halloween, America. Now get off my lawn, ghost or no ghost!
(Ed Anger can be reached at editor@weeklyworldnews.com – but don’t bother, he’s too busy sharpening stakes.)
