It's October. In marketing speak, that means Halloween. Indian corn, pumpkins, and Michael Meyers chasing Jamie Lee Curtis with a chainsaw. A real eye-sparkling time for the kiddies. Unless, of course, they grew up in my family.

I should preface this by saying that I believe in and worship the same God that my mother does. She and I simply go about that worship in very different ways. For the past four years or so, I have been an Episcopalian; Mom goes to one of those full-gospel, "charismatic" churches. (No offense to anybody who may happen to attend one of these services, but my friends like to refer to it as "Our Lady Of Twitch-and-Shout.") I think Mom saw the schism between our faiths forming when, for my senior project at WVU, I wrote a Latin Mass. The Sunday battles during my last few summers at home were truly mind-boggling, with Mom being completely unable to understand why I would have preferred to attend another church. (Dad didn't care; he sleeps in on Sundays.)

Have you ever noticed that those churches like my mothers, which claim to be completely focussed on God's love, are more often centered on fear?

My mother wouldn't let me watch Scooby-Doo, because there were ghosts. I wasn't supposed to read books by Judy Blume, because of the sexual references. My little brother couldn't watch superhero cartoons; "All powers come from God," she said. And Halloween was strictly vorboten. That was probably the hardest blow.

In school, when all the other kids got to decorate Jack O'Lanterns, my mother sent a note to school to ask the teachers to excuse me from the activity. I got to do turkeys instead, a month early. I couldn't watch Halloween movies, either in class or for the whole school. I was told to go sit in the library. I still remember being in kindergarten, sitting in the book corner and crying into a big stuffed Clifford dog while the class watched some benign tale about a friendly ghost. Isn't that the most pathetic thing you've ever heard? I honestly don't know how the teacher put up with it.

On neighborhood Trick-or-Treat night, my mother didn't hand out candy. While the other kids paraded up and down the street in costumes, my pajama-dressed little brother and I crouched in front of the window, peering between the blinds, and wished we could be out there like everybody else, just once. My friend Amy would secretly bring in candy for me the next day, because she felt sorry for me.

Mom said, "Christians don't celebrate Halloween." Why? Is it because it was once a pagan holiday? That doesn't wash; December 25 was once one, too; the church revamped it to make it their own. Just like corporate America has disguised Halloween and made it something completely different. The motivations may be disparate, but the end result is the same.