Geneva, Switzerland – What is it that Americans love about Halloween beyond the childish thrill of having license to consume endless plastic pumpkin containers of sweets?

In fact, as a child growing up in rural Vermont, the best treats were always the homemade caramel apples and candied popcorn our neighbors 4 miles down the road made every year for the handful of kids who would appear in their yard.

Beyond the sweets, it was a social occassion, a chance for parents to show up unannounced, at friends houses for a bit of local gossip and maybe a sip of hard cider from the recent apple harvest.

As an adult, Halloween has become a once a year opportunity to try on other personas, to try on being Gene Simmons for a night (Halloween 1994) or even exaggerated transgender explorations (Monica Lewinsky Halloween 1993).

This year I had the funny experience of being someone I once was (17 year old graduate of a Norwegian gymnas) when my wife pulled out my now ridiculous looking graduation outfit.

Buried beneath the corny devil and witch outfits now available at Migros in Switzerland, is still the thrill of being able to become someone else for a night, checking our familiar personalities at the door and inviting friends and neighbors to journey for a few hours to the land of never never land; in short, to remember what it is to reinvent ourselves.