I wish I could define the specific ingredient in the Halloween season that so moves me to this state of near Nirvana. Better yet, I wish I could capture it, like some exotic particle that announces itself in a supercollider. I could get it in my hands, replicate it and share that bliss with the rest of the gloomy world.

I’m fairly certain that in the days before Halloween, I’m as supremely mystified and happy as any 5-year-old on Christmas Eve.

By the time you read this, it will be one day until the big night. I might be deep in the Vermont woods, hovering over a half-dozen jack-o’-lanterns, peering off into the woods and telling anybody within earshot, “It was a night just like this …”

I might be in a pumpkin patch in remote Pennsylvania, waiting for the perfect gourd to identify itself through some combination of magic and telepathy. I will pick it up, measure its heft in my palms, and inform the orange orb that it was indeed a night just like this one that the horrors of Pumpkinland unfolded.

Someone is going to listen to my stories, dammit, if I have to carve an audience out of pumpkin shells.

I consider this Halloween season a significant one. Four days after it’s over, we will elect a new president and try to ascend out of the muck and mire that was the past four years.

On Saturday morning, most of you will peel off the cheap latex masks you bought the day before to wear to the office Halloween party. It was stifling and stinky and the slits for eyes were not nearly wide enough. You had trouble with orientation and balance and you ended up groping a coat rack instead of the girl from advertising you had your tiny, slitted eyes on.

All the basic things you take for granted became difficult while you wore that cheap accessory, just like the previous years during which your house became unsellable, the economy imperiled your job security and your 401(k) went the way of pumpkin guts flung into a trash bag.

On Halloween night, you will gather around a bucket full of floating apples and tell stories about a house in which chairs rock by themselves and strange groans float down from the attic.

But how scary is that? When the newspaper headlines the same day will announce that 40 more soldiers were killed in Iraq, a deranged and depressed investor killed his entire family in Des Moines and neo-Nazis were caught planning to kill people they hate based on a sinister series of numbers.

I would like to gather you people around the woodpile while the flames of the fire grow low and tell you in gore-crow tones about the horror of three-fingered Willy.

But how much could I frighten you when in the back of your minds, you’re thinking about how your wife lost her job, you can’t pay the mortgage and your guts-or-glory teenager has announced that he wants to join the Army and go to the Middle East?

This year, I fear that any invented-on-the-fly Halloween story will carry no impact for people who are already imagining end-of-the-world scenarios because so much seems to be going wrong in the real world.

There are people stockpiling food in their basements and arming themselves because the possibility of starvation and chaos does not seem so farfetched anymore. What do they care if some grieving novelist is trying to suck his dead wife back into the world through some weird science up in Mulberry, Maine?

People who thought they could retire by now suddenly face the prospect of working into their 80s and living frugally. Why should they be bothered about man-eating plants or growling things that live in closets?

But I don’t mean to depress you, Halloweenie. I think you should go ahead and buy that $99 mask at Spencer’s and absolutely wow them at the office party Friday night. This Halloween might be worth celebrating more than others before it because this year, it all goes back to the very fundamentals of the ancient holiday.

Back in the truly dark days, people placed burning coals in carved-out turnips and pumpkins to ward away evil spirits. They wore masks as a way to avoid detection by ghouls that might be searching for them.

They were a superstitious lot, those forefathers of ours, but were they really so absurd? If we’ve ever needed a way to thwart hexes, brother, it is now. If we can muster a little of that power collectively, with a $6 cape and $3 fangs, maybe all of the monsters will walk right by.

Even the Rev. Doug Taylor, who has condemned Halloween year after year, must admit that real magic exists when people choose to confront their fears rather than running from them.

And so I wish you the happiest of Halloweens, whether you’re carving pumpkins to scare away your demons or hiding in the dark so those trick-or-treaters will pass by your house.

You’re one of those, aren’t you? You don’t want to be bothered by children rapping at your door every five minutes, and so you retreat to the bedroom and keep the lights off.

You have another set of problems to contend with, my friend. And though I don’t approve of your tactics, I will offer this final piece of advice as we prepare for a new, life-changing season.

Dried egg can be removed from a picture window with a mixture of vinegar and water and a whole lot of scrubbing.

You had it coming.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter. You can hex him at [email protected].