Who said Halloween was a minor holiday?  Perhaps it pales in comparison with the month-long secular celebration known as "pre-Christmas Shopping," but walk into any store now and be enveloped by displays of candy, harvest decorations, and costumes and you might agree with us when we say that it has most certainly come into it's own.  Already this year we have attended celebrations at two different zoos, and tonight found us joining in a costume parade, pot-luck dinner, and round of crafts and activities at Halloween Happening at our church.  The church you say?  Sure, Halloween technically grew from pagan roots celebrating the harvest and promoting preparations for the coming of winter, but we can thank Pope Gregory numbers III and IV for moving All Saints Day to November 1st (from some time in May) thereby taking advantage of (or downplaying) this pagan celebration during which the Celts believed that the barrier between the dead and the living was blurred.  In fact, the pagans weren't the ones who named it, since Halloween was Hallowe'en was All-Hallow-even, or "the eve of All Hallows' Day," that being the eve of All Saint's Day, get it?  And that's an over-simplification if we've ever heard one, but you catch the gist of it, and so tonight found us celebrating Hallowe'en with our fellow church members by making creepy crawlies out of pipe-cleaners, masks out of paper plates, and ghosts out of lollipops, in-between which we did haunted calisthenics, and tested our bravery by reaching into dark holes to feel such things as goblin eyeballs and warlock hearts - both of which Calvin immediately tried to eat (hey, a tomato by any other name...), and Calvin got a third opportunity to wear his costume, so we will get our money's worth after all.