Halloween. How I love thee.

I wish every holiday was like Halloween. I wish the goal of every holiday was to dress up and scare each other in a good, know-you're-alive kind of way and give each other bites of candy. I like Christmas and Thanksgiving and Valentine's Day and 4th of July too, but there's not enough of the know-you're-alive thrill in them.

As a kid, Shannon and I would run from house to house, up and down both sides of the street, scavenging for candy like a couple of drug addicts on a sugar-fueled bender. She'd dress up as Vanna White and I'd be a werewolf and our parents would let us run wild through the neighborhood from 6-9pm. We were probably only supposed to be out until 8 but how were they really going to catch us after all those Kit Kats?

When we got home, we'd sorting our candy and trading three crummy things for one good thing. Our mom would claim her Snickers. And then we would binge on candy for two weeks until all that was left was those gross peanut butter candies in black and orange wax paper that were unexpectedly better than you'd remembered when you finally had no choice but to eat them.

Halloween post trick-or-treating age was as much fun as Halloween of youth. In college, I'd leave campus and go to my parents house to dress up as a witch and hand out candy. I'd either sit really still on the porch with the bowl of candy in my lap and then, as the kid was reaching in for loot, say in a creepy witch voice, "Just one now," or I'd stand inside the door looking out the window at them and just stare until they saw me and fell backwards off the porch. Either way, they always got a candy reward for surviving their first heart attack.

When I got my own house that could be decorated, Halloween carved out an even bigger spot in my heart. I spent thousands of dollars on decorations that were basically given away when we moved to California the first time. Over the years I've phased out inflatables and kitsch and invested in creepy oddities that I can enjoy year round – bugs, old typewriters, antique photo albums, horse teeth. Now I spend the weeks leading up to Halloween making detailed decorations – dollhouses, bell jars, straightjackets. And that's my favorite part, the permission to go inside the creepy vaults of my mind and play around with ideas that turn into things.

Aside from the imagination and creative doing, I also love the dressing up. Other people are much better at it than me, but I love that you get to pretend to be anything or anyone. Halloween has let me be Cleopatra, a ringmaster, Lizzie Borden, a prisoner, Shirley Temple, a nurse, Frida Kahlo, a bearded lady, Regan from the Exorcist, a creepy doll, an art thief, and, this year, a candy striper (that actually looked like a '50s waitress but whatever).

I've been a devoted Halloween celebrator for over a decade now, and most of the time that celebration has taken the form of a party – one year it meant going to the haunted Universal Studios with Ruble (who is not so big a fan of the scary but who lovingly supports my addiction) and one year it was limited to carving pumpkins. After a decade-long love affair, I thought it'd be fun to take stock of Halloweens past and tease what's to come for Halloween future.