1. Starbucks begins to advertise their pumpkin spice lattes as their “special” drink.
2. The weird old lady in front of you in the checkout line is waiting to buy a Halloween costume for her dog.
3. The spider webs that are stretching across the plants on your balcony seem sort of “festive.”
4. Every television channel is playing a different sequel to “Friday the 13th” at the same time.
5. You start getting random thoughts about the “Great Pumpkin” rising up out of the pumpkin patch and pray to God that Linus doesn’t convince Lucy to waste her entire evening again this year.
6. Stores start filling their “seasonal” aisles with trick-or-treat candy AND Christmas stuff.
7. You wake up in the middle of the night finding yourself craving Hirschbrau Doppel Hirsch, bratwurst, and spaetzle.
8. Seeing a smashed pumpkin on the street brings back hostile feelings from your childhood.
9. Caramel apples seem worth the risk of having to replace that $2,000 crown on your back molar.
10. “Goth” kids seem sort of fashionable.
11. The price of a $3 pumpkin skyrockets to $35.
12. Silly Halloween stuff like this starts floating around the internet again.
13. Non-superstitious people start leaving the number 13 off their lists.
14. That creepy guy who lives across the street that you sometimes catch watching you from his window as you walk to your car begins to leave you odd little gifts and newspaper clippings about random news articles that don’t seem to connect with one another. And then somehow gets your cell phone number and calls you to tell you that he thinks it’s cool you have a black cat because Halloween is coming up, but that you shouldn’t expect the black cat to protect you from evil spirits. And then he tells you to be careful because people can break into apartments so easily and you never know when it’s going to happen.
15. You’re in the middle of writing a blog post and