Halloween is stupid

From an article in The New York Times today:

Mr. O’Donnell said that when he was a boy in Scotland, he and his friends regularly went door to door, playing out an old Celtic tradition.

“It was called guising,” he explained. “You put an old sheet over your head and went to all the houses in the village, and you always had to do something, like sing a song or tell a joke.” The children did not receive candy then — just apples and, maybe, peanuts, he said. Since there were no pumpkins, they carved turnips.

Wow. And I thought the American South was poor and backwards.