Boo! Scared you, didn't I. Hey, pay attention, it's almost Halloween. All the little lions and tigers and Power Rangers are going to be out in force. People feel two ways about this annual event - either they get with the program or they think it's all nonsense.

I fall into the former group. When my kids were small, we turned this annual nonsense event into a major production. I say "we" - it was me. I have this tendency to go overboard and Halloween is great because you can get away with nearly anything.

In August I'd start planning, checking out fabric stores, flipping through complicated costume patterns, ignoring my kids' pleas to buy them a ready-made costume. Those were the days Star Wars characters were popular. Too bad, because I'm a traditionalist. Those were also the days when I was a sewing maniac. That old Singer sat on the middle of the dining room table, straight pins stuck out of the carpet, little pieces of thread showed up in the Parkay.

Halloween isn't for little kids; it's for their over-enthusiastic mothers. Halloween was the only time of the year I wished I had a little girl because I had this compulsion to dress someone as a ballerina, a princess or a fairy godmother. But once my sons got old enough to react to peer pressure they wouldn't let me put them in tutus and pink tulle anymore so I was forced to switch to boy things like hobos, vampires and devils.

My biggest Halloween disaster was a mummy costume. But it wasn't my fault; I was dealing with an uncooperative four-year-old mummy. I took a sheet, cut it into miles of two-inch-wide strips, then spent hours wrapping mommy's little mummy. Minutes after I had the whole thing secured (I sewed it as I wrapped!), the mummy had to "go." This created a problem because mommy's mummy couldn't bend his arms at the elbows (a necessity for that particular activity) and worse, the mummy's mommy forgot to allow for that particular activity. I was forced to partially unwrap him, then rewrap all over again. It was worth the trouble. People thought he looked great! People had him come inside so they could take his picture. Unfortunately, by the third house his costume started to unravel and a wailing mummy isn't scary, it's pathetic. A kind neighbor accepted the miles of dirty, trampled sheet and gave us a grocery bag in which she had poked two eyeholes. My son was thrilled but I was very disappointed. After all that work and effort (not to mention the loss of a sheet!) he ends up trick-or-treating as an inverted paper bag.

The next year I decided to try my hand at making a scarecrow. It was one of my best Halloween creations and I remember it with pride. Mention it to my 27-year-old son and he remembers it too, then immediately breaks out in hives.

I even went over to the neighbor's barn and grabbed a bag full of straw so my scarecrow looked pretty darn good. It would have looked even better if my son let me put a long, vertical stick in his shirt so that his arms were suspended in the air just like a real scarecrow but he objected because it was difficult to walk that way. He pitched such a fit that I finally agreed to forget the stick if he promised to hold his arms out away from his sides. He promised but he didn't do it. You simply can't trust a three-year-old to keep a promise.

Everyone made such a fuss over his costume, taking his picture, that's how great he looked. What people were most impressed with was all that straw sticking out of his collar and cuffs. Unfortunately, after ten minutes the kid started jumping around and howling and clawing at the straw.

Here's a Halloween tip for anyone thinking about transforming their children into temporary scarecrows: if you plan to use straw, check it for bugs before you stuff it into their clothes.

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