THE CANDY CRUSH IS OVER. Halloween is behind us once again. The skeletons are back in their closets. The spider webs are stuffed into their sacks. Pumpkin shells have either gone to the compost heap or they’ve been smashed in the middle of the street by unknown assailants, as per tradition.

We won’t have another candy-based holiday again until Easter, except for the Thanksgiving hams and pies and Christmas chocolates and Valentine’s Day chocolates.

St. Patrick’s Day and the Fourth of July hang on as the sacred days of brined and preserved meats. And where is vegetable day?

Anyhow, I dig Halloween. It’s one of my favorite holidays because we get to dress up in silly costumes and parade about like fools and decorate our houses and celebrate fearlessly with the dead. It’s a colorful and connected experience, and I like haunted houses.

Pranks, hoaxes, harmless vandalism and assorted other tricks are part of the celebration. Who’s not fond of tricks, besides an occasional victim? The best tricks are funny for everyone.

When I was a boy, hanging out with other boys in my small home town, prone to mischief without the judgment necessary to determine its impact, my grandmother stood sentry for the neighborhood kids. To keep us out of trouble, she gave us bars of soap. “Go soap some windows,” she’d say. “And nothing else.”

The next day we could go door to door and offer to wash windows for two dollars. All we needed was a rag and a spigot.

We used to do ghost walks, living so close to the forest. We had trails behind my house that went for miles through dense forest. The lady who had a full-time job supervising the town’s playground that backed to the forest taught us this game.

During the daylight, with help, she’d carry four small pails of water down the trail, setting one down in the center of the trail every few hundred feet until the last pail was deep in the forest. We had several trails and many pails.

Once darkness fell, four boys would volunteer for the ghost walk. They’d go down the trail without flashlights. When they reached the first pail, the most terrified boy would grab it and run back to civilization alone without spilling. If someone accidentally kicked over a pail in the dark, it became their pail. Loser. Beyond that, either volunteerism or age determined who carried the next pail. As the group shrank, each boy had to return alone from farther away in the forest canopy. It took courage and age to retrieve the farthest pail. I never made it.

Oh, and before the walks we always told ghost stories about the madman with the bloody hatchet who lived in the woods and was only a wispy blue outline. We saw him everywhere.

This year my grandsons made a haul in the candy department. We all went on a weekend-long haunted camping trip at a gated RV resort in the foothills. Residents set up tables in front of their spaces and passed out candy by the fistfuls.

Our boys and their friends came back to camp early. It was to dump their first loads of candy. They had pillowcases that looked like the pillow was still inside, so heavy they had to sling them over their shoulders.

Like many folks I suppose, our freezer is now full of enough penny candy to last until next Halloween. The question is who will eat the majority of it, the kids, the parents or the grandparents? I do love the Butterfingers.

As we shut the lid on the Jack-o-lanterns and pointy hats and look ahead, what’s coming? More holidays! Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s. We’ve put a lot of fun into our otherwise bitter winter months. Perhaps they will help us take our minds off the 6-foot snow drifts and droughts around the planet.

I have noticed one rather disappointing aspect to current Halloween celebrations. The quality of the candy has gone downhill. As I was rummaging through my grandchildren’s candy while they were outside playing, I couldn’t find a single decent candy bar. All they had was packets of five candy corns or 10 M&M’s or a few shapeless gummy balls. They had mountains of rolled sugar pills. I can get better snacks than that on Southwest.

Folks in the heyday bought cases of full-sized Mars Bars, Mallo Cups, or Hershey Bars. One of my favorite candies to receive were the packages of Wrigley’s gum, Juicy Fruit and Spearmint. Chewing gum has a great shelf life and doesn’t need to be refrigerated. I remember having a few packs of Halloween gum in my bedside drawer in the following summer.

Susan bought the Halloween candy this year. She came home with a huge sacket of packets. What can I say? We had different childhoods. Her response was that she ran off and bought the candy early intentionally because she knew if I did it, I’d be buying cases of expensive full-sized candy bars.

“Those kids go home with eight pounds of candy. They don’t need your full-sized candy bars, Mr. Nostalgia.”

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.