Fall shows up every year around the same time, bringing with it a lassitude and general malaise portending the onset of the somber winter months. It is in these times when an economy of mind and spirit is most important. On Oct. 31, though, there exists a single bastion of indulgence and hedonism to get through such adversity.

Hope -- thy name is Halloween.

Last year was my first living away from home and the first Halloween I spent neither tricking nor treating. It was indeed a trying time. With a mouth full of the sweetest of sweet teeth, Halloween is without a doubt my favorite day of the year.

Unlike holidays such as Easter and Valentine's Day, which come with delicious but esoteric treats, Halloween is instead an orgy of all things candy. Where the gratification of other holidays is masked by moral overtones like "giving" and "brotherhood," Halloween's goal is simply to get as much candy as you can, by any means necessary including lying to your little brother.

A pillowcase full of free candy seems pretty awesome and, for the most part, it really is. Having a lot of candy is nice, but it's really the heterogeneousness of a given haul that makes it so great. Twenty-five pounds of candy wouldn't be as enticing if it were all only one type. Variance not just in type but in size as well adds to the pleasure; there were always a few houses giving out the king size candy bars, everyone knew which ones they were.

To say Halloween is without its pitfalls, however, would be shortsighted. There are bound to be a few bad apples in even the best of harvests and, bountiful though Halloween may be, there are indeed things to look out for.

First, there's the Clark Bar. If you're like me -- in which case, congratulations on being so awesome -- you saved the good candy to the end, which meant Clark Bars were the very first thing you ate, if you ate them at all. I would usually eat about two per Halloween: One to make sure I hadn't forgotten how they tasted, and another to make sure it wasn't a fluke.

For some reason, not every house gives out candy. I realize not everyone can be home to pass out sweets, but if you're going to answer the door, you'd better have some damn sugar for me. A penny for my thoughts probably means a couple eggs for your house, ma'am. There was actually a lady in my neighborhood who gave out pennies one year, unwrapped, unshelled peanuts the next, and pencils the year after that.

Now, maybe it was just where I lived, but I always got an insane amount of weird foreign candy and as a curious kid I always tore off the weird foreign wrapper (featuring incongruous things like lobsters and despondent purple children) and ate my share, never learning my lesson. I'm not a xenophobe by any means, and I realize other countries and cultures have different tastes or whatever, but come on. Regardless of whence the foreign candies originated -- and trust me, in my trick or treating career, I've had candy from every corner of the globe -- it invariably tastes bad.

My qualms with Starburst are less about the candy itself and more about the underlying principles. Opening one of those Halloween two-packs is like scratching off a lottery ticket, only with less explicable odds of winning. Simple probability, with four total flavors and three really good ones, you have a 75 percent chance of getting something decent. After opening package after package of double-lemon, though, the only conclusion one can draw is that Starburst transcends all laws of mathematics.

I'm not so oblivious to not realize how obnoxiously hackneyed it is to point out that "fun size" candy bars aren't really as "fun" as the bigger varieties, but neither am I so jaded as to forget I love candy. In spite of the fact that I've spent the duration of this piece complaining, Halloween really is the single best day of the year. As a kid, it was the day you could stay up late and eat as much candy as you want. Now it's the day to let go of the other rules society has set for you, be it making your costume an offensive physical joke or simply an excuse to dress as slutty as you can. If it's one day a year, what's wrong with a little decadence?