Americans have always had a love affair with Halloween, but in the last few years true lunacy has taken over. This became apparent to me a few days ago as I was driving to a meeting in a location I was unfamiliar with. The gathering was being held in a country church. As I drove down a serpentine road in pitch darkness, I suddenly came upon 12-foot-high goblins, skeletons and various monsters looming over the lawn of an otherwise nondescript house. I veered, nearly drove into a tree, parked and stared. The blow-up ghouls did provide needed light on a street as dark as a coal mine, but, really?

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Decorations go on sale during summer, so no wonder that a similarly elaborate display stands before a house about a half-mile from my own. This one is replete with skeletons, but with one unique difference. The skeletons scream every few minutes, completely freaking out my dogs if I happen to walk past during their timed, blood-curdling shrieks. It makes me wonder: If someone on the street screamed for help, would anyone react? The nearby residents are becoming accustomed to continually hearing the sound effects of a horror movie. But at least a few residents are elderly, and maybe they just turn off their hearing aids.

I’m not really the Grinch who Stole Halloween. I like it still, and loved it when I was a child, even without dancing skeletons around the house. In my day, the holiday was preceded by Beggars Night, a sort of Halloween lite, an excuse for the bravest among us to dress up and go door to door to collect candy for two nights, not just one.

Mind you, the success of the holiday depended on good weather. We all feared a single thing: snow. In Buffalo, the city in which I grew up, it wasn’t an unusual sight to see snowflakes drifting down in October. If the weather was cold, we would have to put winter coats over our witch, ghost, or scarecrow costumes, opening our coats like flashers after screaming “Trick or Treat!” at every door to prove we were really in costume.

And who doesn’t enjoy dressing up? Even as an adult, I dressed as a vampire when my son, Tim, was in eighth grade, and we gathered his friends to celebrate. That delighted them, but to surprise me, three of them dressed as me, complete with gray-haired wigs. (Love those boys.) It was the ultimate compliment.

Twenty years later, my daughter, Anna, now has two daughters of her own, Riley, 2, and Ellie, 6, and she assures me that Halloween is not just one or two nights. It feels like a month, she told me, a note of exasperation in her voice. The school celebrates it. Little Riley’s daycare celebrates it. There is something called, “Trunk or Treat,” where parents give out candy from the open trunks of their cars. By the time the actual day rolled around yesterday, the kids had been on a sugar high, if not a diabetic coma, for days.

And costumes? I’ll have you know that my granddaughters were both princesses. Not just Halloween, either. The Cult of Disney has taken over; the girls run around the house singing “Let it Go,” from the Disney movie, “Frozen.” They wear long gowns and tiaras. Ellie told her mother recently that she needed gloves that reached to her elbows. Who knew?

It doesn’t surprise me. I took Ellie to the play, “Frozen,” in the past year and she was ready; with her gown and glittering shoes, she fit right in. When we arrived at the theater, the entire audience was crowded with hundreds of Elsas and Annas, Elsa being the crown princess of Arendelle with uncontrollable magical ice powers that haunt her, and her younger sister, Anna, who is brave and determined to help Elsa, and at the same time, renew their relationship as sisters.

I enjoyed being in the audience looking at these dressed-up girls more than I did the play. It was February, and not autumn, but it felt like Halloween. Who needs the last day of October?

After all, here it is November and the holiday continues in my neighborhood. I just walked the dogs, and the decorations are still up. For all I know, the shrieking skeletons will stay vocal until New Year’s Day. Maybe by then my dogs will be used to them.