Halloween: Too scary too early?

20-foot skeletons blowing ominously in the wind? Hands and feet sticking out from would-be graves in nearby grass? Vampires hanging from trees with arms outstretched? Witches with wicked smiles just beckoning for "a bite" of an innocent passerby, and if you happen to nonchalantly ring someone's doorbell, you may encounter any one of many spine-tingling sounds.

Are all these meant to get us in the mood for Halloween? Wow. What happened to the kid-friendly innocence of trick-or-treating and gathering a bagful of candy?

Drive around these days, and you will see yard after yard with over-the-top salutes to the youngster's favorite holiday.

One might wonder if our need to impress the entire block with "better than the guy next door" Halloween decorations may have gone too far.

If some of this stuff starts to get a little uncomfortable to otherwise well-adjusted adults, what might it feel like for young kids passing by? Are we unexpectedly giving the little ones nightmares or worse?

Almost equally frightening is the fact that these horror-filled yard displays are going up earlier and earlier.

We all know that grocery and department stores start hawking Halloween stuff around the Fourth of July. We have become almost trained to expect that early onslaught, but now we have a new phenomenon.

Folks decorate their yards with Halloween paraphernalia a month before the holiday. Even as early as late September. A bit too soon, no?

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that just as the Independence Day American Flags are taken down, boom! Up come the Halloween decorations in the front yards, with full all-out displays and impressive thematic presentations. It's all pretty cool, and the work put in to set it up deserves the utmost recognition, but it may be too soon and too scary.

It used to be the only thing kids were afraid of were the little bite-sized candies being passed out (so disheartening) or, worse yet, a friendly neighbor putting an apple or a toothbrush in the old candy bag (oh, the horrors of those childhood memories).

We should mention the pumpkins themselves are part of this new fright fest. What used to be mostly smiling, friendly, round little orange guys— have now, way too often, turned into something much worse, with carved-out faces showing menacing teeth, mouths turned downward, and evil-looking eyes with fierce stares that could put a hole right through a brick wall. Pumpkin eyes that almost say, "You get too close to our front door, you will be bitten so hard you might have pumpkin seeds coming out of your bloodstream."

And have a nice day.

On a related note, the world record for the largest pumpkin ever grown was set last week in Half Moon Bay, California— a town far from San Francisco. In the official weigh-off, it clocked in at 2,749 pounds—an all-time world record.

We can only hope that when they carve out this behemoth's face, it will be a smiling one.