I usually have to know people for a while before I admit one of my biggest character flaws to them ... I hate Halloween.

Since I've been here since April, I figure I can go ahead and tell all our readers.

I don't hate the season itself. I decorate my house; I have strands of lights in the shapes of bats, pumpkins and ghosts. I don't like carving pumpkins, but I like the way jack o'lanterns look on my porch. I love "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown."

It's Halloween itself. The actual holiday.

It's not one of those things I started hating as an adult, either, like snow (remember when you couldn't wait for it to snow, and now you just want it to go away the second it happens?). No, my hatred of Halloween began a long, long time ago.

To begin with, I grew up, for the most part, in Michigan. By Oct. 31, the temperatures were about sub-zero. It snowed on more than one Halloween. When I was really little my mother made our costumes (I have to admit that one of my favorite photos is of my twin sister Jodi dressed like Little Red Riding Hood and me dressed as Peter Pan when we were about 2 in get-ups my mom whipped up on her Singer), but as I got older I wanted to have a store-bought costume like everyone else.

Problem was, these store-bought costumes were made out of plastic. Wearing winter duds under them was uncomfortable and looked ridiculous, and if you wore your coat over them, no one could tell what you were supposed to be. And the masks that went with those costumes ... you couldn't breathe through them, and nine times out of ten the elastic busted midway through Trick-or-Treating and you ended up carrying it or stuffing it in your bag.

My sister was also a contributor to my hatred of Halloween.

This girl wanted to hit every house in town. While I would have been content to visit two, maybe three neighborhoods, she insisted on hiking down every street. By the time she was willing to call it quits (and you must remember, this Trick-or-Treat "hours" thing is a fairly new phenomenon ... it used to be you could pound the pavement for treats pretty much all night), I had blisters on my feet, I was freezing and I was exhausted. I usually never even went up to the doors at the last few houses, preferring to stay back with my mother and whine.

After we got home, we would weed through our bags, chucking the icky Blackjacks and peanut butter kisses into the trash and counting up the "good stuff" ... Hershey Bars, Kit Kats, peanut butter cups. I would blow through what I liked pretty quickly, because I had less candy than Jodi and I have never liked candy that much anyway, so I would give her things I didn't want.

Another reason I hated Halloween was because I didn't see why I should go begging for food when I got fed at home. It made no sense to me.

I went trick-or-treating for myself for the last time when I was 7 or 8. I never went again until my daughter started going.

My son has been anxious for Halloween for weeks. He started thinking in August about what he was going to be ... he considered Batman, Spiderman, a skeleton, a pirate, a zombie and a fireman.

When he finally decided he wanted to be The Grim Reaper (my friend Emily says my son is a "an enigma wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a mystery" because he's this sweet, tender little boy and he came up with that), we got a note from his after school program asking us not to dress him in anything "scary" or "gruesome."

Turns out he only wanted to be The Grim Reaper because he liked the sickle. So he became a sickle-wielding ninja.

I'm trying to be excited for him, but it's not easy. I guess that's a parental sacrifice I have to make.