Dear Rev. Doug Taylor,

A happy Halloween season to you. As I do each year, I enjoyed your thoughts on the holiday. And I gladly accept the unspoken challenge to play Dracula again this year to your Van Helsing. I will happily assume the role of John Proctor to your Reverend Parris. Hannibal Lecter to your Clarice Starling.

I could go on and on. This perennial debate inspires me. But I refuse to portray it as a battle of good versus evil. I am not evil, though I don the dress of a vampire each year, indulge myself in a diet of horror movies, cast a strobe-light glare upon the ghouls and ghosts dangling on my porch.

Mr. Taylor, I have come to enjoy these exchanges because I perceive you are descended from the folks who made the Salem witch trials such a horror. You see the devil in sickly crops. You hear him in the wind that chills your home and in the death cries of livestock.

If you can’t bring yourself to blame modern maladies on the inherent woes of humankind, blame the pagans. Blame a holiday that marks the changing of seasons with costume and celebration. Blame people like me who so delight in it because the landscape of Halloween is not quite right without a few shadows cast upon it.

I appreciate all that you do, Mr. Taylor. We all do, down here in the dark.

Truly, Count Markula.

The fact is that I like the good reverend. He’s a man who believes in what he does and takes action when he can. That I disagree with almost all of his beliefs is aside from the fact.

Every year, I want to remind Mr. Taylor that there is nothing to fear. Pagans quietly celebrate the Earth and cast white charms on those who seek it. They have existed longer than modern religions and yet I have never heard of a holy war begun in their name.

“Beneath Halloween’s candy coating is a history of diabolical evil,” writes the poetic, if overly dramatic Taylor.

Anyone might react with a long explanation about the origins of All Hallow’s Eve and the history of warding away spirits, not inviting them. They are sound arguments, though a bit dated. These days, people tend to celebrate Halloween because it is one night out of the year when you can assume the face of your fears, rather than cringe from them.

But who needs another history lesson? The Halloween enthusiasts that I know want to absorb the sweet ambiance of the season, not waste valuable time defending it.

I have spiffy new fangs that fit my mouth just right. The hanging ghouls are ready for the porch and my cape is washed and ready. Plastic bats are hanging precisely and the Angel of Death has been scrubbed and polished.

I love Halloween because it is giddy and accommodating, a night to put yourself on display when normally you would not. Halloween is pumpkins and jack-o’-lanterns, black cats and paper skeletons. It is normally shy people who hide behind bushes and scare their friends. It’s a night of make-believe in a world where reality sometimes rubs you raw.

Grown men and women hand out candy to children dressed as superheroes. Taylor rails against the custom, though he himself throughout the year hands out candy to children, sweet tokens given with his words of caution and advice.

Doug Taylor might label me a heathen because I cavort in the guise of Andre Linoge, though the wicked Stephen King character was created on a Hollywood set. He would have my room at home condemned because there is a witch in one corner, a leering ghoul in the other. God only knows what the reverend would make of my newsroom desk. He might pray for my soul because I have been wild about Halloween since I was old enough to understand the concept.

“Children should not imitate the detestable and have nothing to do with witchcraft or the fruitless deeds of darkness,” he writes.

But what is detestable? Is a long fascination with the macabre enough to send your soul spinning, steaming toward hell? For me and others far more successful, it has meant novels and short stories and other creative works culled from the darkness Taylor so condemns. There is nothing fruitless about those ambitions. To judge it that way, one has to imagine Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare residing in the pit of the damned.

Every time the reverend attacks pagans, I think of their credo: Harm no one, do what you will. It’s as simple as live and let live. A more harmless way of conducting a life I can’t imagine.

And yet here I am again. Taking minutes out of my precious Halloween schedule to defend one of my most extreme passions. The season is too short to be under attack. It’s here and gone, like wood smoke.

I’ll say no more about it. I’ll just end with an invitation to Mr. Taylor to come with me to a bonfire in the woods of Vermont. Sit in the darkness and listen to a ghost story or two. No? Then I would ask that he remain quiet so that I and others might enjoy the night.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter, and a Christian.

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