It is 1 October. There are 30 Days until Halloween.

Halloween has always been my favorite holiday, but not for the usual, popular reasons. I am not, for instance, one of those adults who try to recapture some nostalgic notion of Halloweens past by purchasing every lawn decoration at the store. I don’t like parties, and I don’t like dressing up, so I am not into buying costumes. Aside from picking up a decoration or two to stick in the windows, carving a jack-o’-lantern, and buying a bag of candy just in case a few trick-or-treaters come a-knockin’, I don’t really engage in any outward celebration of Halloween.

That’s not the reason for the season, so far as I’m concerned.

Halloween is the film noir of holidays. It is a celebration of a mood and an attitude more than a specific event or person. As the end of October nears, shadows get a little longer, and the daylight hours get a little shorter. The air in the mornings as you walk to the bus stop (either for school or for work) is crisper and cooler than it was a month before. Sweaters and jackets come out of the cedar closet. The leaves - brittle, sear, and the colors of a 1970s basement rumpus room - fall from the trees to form crackly and crunchy drifts.

Like the colors of the leaves, attitudes become muted in this spooky atmosphere. You won’t find the hope of springtime here or the raucous energy of summer. In the fall, as Halloween approaches, there is a general turning away from our busy “outdoor” lives as we prepare for the slower pace and more introspective nature of our “indoor” lives during the winter.

Personally, I’ve always enjoyed the darker, second half of the year to the sunnier first half. I prefer the hibernation of winter to summer’s hedonism. The quiet and the dark are places and states of mind that allow the imagination to wander, to speculate, to assume the worst. In the autumn, that sound you hear in the middle of the night isn’t the house settling: it’s the step of the thing in the closet. The light in the basement not coming on when you flick the switch isn’t due to a burned-out bulb, it’s the shadow monster dining on the light and hoping to make you dessert.

I’m a horror junkie, so Halloween is that time of year when the trappings of nature finally match my interior mood. The long shadows, cool air, and quiet streets lend an extra layer of creepiness to the movies I watch, the books I read, and the music I listen to. If you feel the same way, if you are tired of seeing Halloween celebrated, in the words of Ebenezer Scrooge about another holiday, as “a false and commercial festival,” then for the next 30 days this blog may be your one-stop shop for everything weird, creepy, and outré.