It's All Hallow's Eve, people! The time of the year when we all dress up in cheap costumes and hit our neighbors up for candy. Woohoo!

Now, some uneducated fools will try to tell you that Halloween was traditionally a pagan holiday in Europe, known as the Day of the Dead. Apparently Celts thought dead guys walked around that night, and they would leave food out for them. Personally, if some dead dude came shambling around MY village at 2am, I wouldn't FEED the loser. But Celts are kinda weird. Anyway, the Celts were having a great time feeding the living dead once a year, but then some Christian guys turned up and decided the Day of the Dead was satanic. They turned the day into a holiday (typical monks; always looking for a party) known as "All Saints Day." I'm not sure what the signifigance of this day was, other than you you drank a lot and prayed a bit.

BUT the above story, though widely believed, is a MYTH. The REAL story of Halloween is as follows:

Once upon a time, in the quiet village of Ween, there lived a fellow by the name of Hal. Hal was kind of a bum. He almost never did any work around the village. No one really complained though, because he almost never bathed either, and nobody wanted to get near enough to him to tell him to get to work.

Hal really liked candy, but he never had any money to buy some with. So, about once a week, he would dress up in a cheap costume and rob all his neighbors of candy. His neighbors were kind of dumb, so they never realized it was Hal under all that makeup and the witch hat.

Eventually, Hal began to branch out into neighboring villages: robbing them of all THEIR candy. The outraged villagers called a council meeting to try and figure out who the culprit was. But they were all too thick to figure out it was Hal, so they just played a few games of checkers and went home.

The robberies continued though, leaving everyone really hacked off. In the true spirit of democracy, the villagers decided that finding a way to FIX the problem was too much trouble, and so determined to just make it worse.

Every week the good (but dull) people of Ween--and surrounding villages--would dress up in cheap costumes from K-Mart and rob all their neighbors. The end result being that EVERYONE got ripped off, including Hal. In time, people realized that this was actually kind of fun, and began to look forward to pawning off crappy candy on their fellow villagers.

But, buying all that candy every week began to get pricey, so they voted to keep The Great Candy-Robbery Day to just once a year: October 31. On his deathbed, Hal admitted to being the original candy-thief, so they changed the name of the holiday to "Hal of Ween's Great Candy-Robbery Day." But that was hard to fit on billboards and promotional bumper-stickers, so they shortened it to "Hal of Ween," and then someobody dropped the F and added and extra L to make it prettier.

And THAT my friends, is the TRUE story of Hal o' Ween!