The year has come round to my favorite season — bittersweet, melancholy, glorious fall. Up where I was born the maples have already flamed and the leaf fall is far advanced. Here, the drabber foliage is beginning to filter down to the ground and we come to my favorite holiday — Halloween.

I am aware that this is a minority view, but I believe I am in the right. Thanksgiving is in theory a sweet time of family reunion, but as a kid it was tedious, largely filled with adult strangers whose reminiscences were of a foreign land -— the past. And while the women cooked and served and cleaned up and gossiped, the men, nearly mute, smoked and watched football. Boring.

Christmas always seemed to me fraught with anxiety. Would people, especially me, get what they wanted? Would they like what you got them? Would the usual bickering remain tamped down or break into the open, spoiling the overhyped joy that was never quite matched by the prosaic reality? And the weather at Christmas had usually begun to turn miserably cold and would stay that way for a long, dark, dreary season.

Easter baffled me. If you believed, the mystical joy of Sunday was pretty seriously undercut by the all-too-awful and plausible brutality of the previous Friday. If you didn’t believe, the candy was pretty lame compared to Christmas and the greatest holiday of all. Marshmallow pastel chickens? Sugar eggs?

I loved the Fourth of July with its fireworks and sentiment until it was hijacked during the Vietnam era when those of one bullying political stripe sought to annex it and evict those of another — rather in the same way that Dallas decided only the Cowboys could be America’s team.

But Halloween never disappointed. First, it had no larger import or agenda or motive. It was just fun for kids and the kid-like. It gave you, if husbanded wisely, several months supply of forbidden fruit in the form of candy. This in a less affluent and self-indulgent era when mountains of sugary treats were not an everyday diet.

Best of all, Halloween’s whole premise was to exchange the dull everyday reality for something different, something better, dreamlike, weird, uncanny. It was a trip from the unforgiving daylight world to the realm of moonlight, candlelight, Jack-o’-Lanterns aglow and spooks and frights, adventures and odysseys.

On Halloween one got to dress up, to don a mask, to leave one’s everyday self behind and become transformed, even if only for one night. It shares this in common with Saturnalia, Mardi Gras, Carnival, the masked ball.

Best of all, from a kid’s point of view, on this magical occasion the usual rules and roles were reversed. Instead of being inferiors — bossed around, instructed, controlled — kids were for once in charge. It is their night in which grown-ups have only bit parts. Kids wear the gaudy costumes. They occupy the night, take over the streets and roam from house to house. They ring the doorbell and demand tribute, and the grown-ups have to comply. The adults are the ones sent to time-out for a change. Kids Rule.

I may also have been particularly fond of Halloween because I was abetted in it by my grandmother. She was a crackerjack seamstress who would try to execute whatever loony costume idea I could come up with. The planning for these often began months ahead of the big night.

When I was quite young she made me into a fantastic Little Red Riding Hood with cape and hood and basket and long blonde braids, a costume that was good enough to persuade quite a few folks on my street that I was a girl. Later I was cowboys and Superman and Zorro, but they were largely off the shelf costumes improved by her additions.

In a Scrooge McDuck comic I found a villain called The Blot whose costume was essentially that of a ghost, only in inky black. But the most challenging costume ever was a man-size, science-fiction, bipedal bug from another comic book who hailed from the planet Pluto. It had skinny legs below and a carapace that covered the back like a ladybug’s, except it was in forest green with chartreuse polka-dots.

The face was dominated by huge bug eyes which stumped my grandmother for awhile until my mother proposed using the cups from a brassiere with eyeholes cut out of the center. It was a masterpiece, and I assumed I was a shoe-in to win the town’s costume contest. But I figured without the eternal cluelessness and lack of poetry on the part of adults who seemed befuddled when I told them I was a Plutonian. Perhaps they mistook me for a frightening metaphor for the nuclear explosive — plutonium. But that should have won the prize too.

Whatever the cause, a prosaic hobo came in first, though such a costume obviously required no imagination to conceive or execute. I felt my grandmother had been robbed. Luckily, by the end of the night I had a substantial bag of candy to console myself with. I’d like to believe I shared it with her, but kids are rather miserly with their ill-gotten gains, so I may have behaved uncharitably.

I am completely sure that the next day was a downer. Here we were one again in the harsh light of day rather than the enchanted darkness, in school clothes rather than a fanciful costume, and once more under the thumb of people who couldn’t even discern the superiority of Plutonians to hobos. And ahead of us stretched a long 364 days until the next Halloween.