For a while there, Halloween was a kid's holiday. It meant putting on a plastic costume from Kress, and going trick-or-treating, usually with Mama or Daddy following at a discreet distance to make sure you didn't pull any tricks.

Now Mama and Daddy are out themselves, costumed and cackling, having as good a time as any child. Keith Hurtt was the Big Bad Wolf last year -- he and wife Dee haven't selected their outfits this year, but it will be something good. Trish Cone will be decked out in a black bridal dress and wig. Robyn Halverson plans to wear something with glitter, hair extenders and showing lots of flesh.

Although it has metamorphosed in the last couple of decades, Halloween is still a far cry, of course, from its ancient roots: the Druid festival of Samheim, which involved burning people alive, and even from the milder Christian embodiment, when spirits roamed on the eve of All Saints Day.

Before trick-or-treating appeared in the late 1940s, All Hallows' Eve had descended into nothing more than an evening of mischief-making by children.

Nobody bothered with costumes unless they were going to a party somewhere. But if you were really in the spirit, you might carve a pumpkin and put a candle in it, an idea brought to New Orleans by Irish immigrants in the mid-1800s. (The Irish traditionally carved turnips, but switched when they noticed the wonderfully scoopable qualities of pumpkins, so abundant in America.

If you went to a Catholic school you had the day off the next day for All Saints Day -- although you did have to get up early enough to go to Mass. Then you'd probably go with your mother and aunts to the cemetery to tidy up the family tomb and decorate it with chrysanthemums.

Nonetheless, Halloween was a fine night for staying up late. Parents turned a blind eve when the kids disappeared for an hour or two after dark to indulge in daring escapades like ringing doorbells and running away, or carrying someone's garbage can a few houses down the block.

Then somebody invented the idea of trick or treat, which, coincidentally or not, mimicked a number of Old World customs involving people going from door-to-door begging on that night. The idea spread across the United States and a generation of youngsters came to equate Halloween with costumes and Tootsie Rolls and stomachaches. They were -- you guessed it -- the Baby Boomers.

And when they grew up, they weren't about to turn Halloween over to the kiddies. Not in New Orleans, anyway. And so Halloween mutated once more, from a night on which adults could look forward to windows marked up with Octagon soap, to a night for them to play as much as the youngsters.

"The only thing more fun than frightening the bejesus out of small children on Halloween is being a child having the thrill of being scared to death," says Keith Hurtt.

He especially relishes the memory of one such escapade. He set out the trick or treat candy and a huge jack-o-lantern on a cloth-covered table in front of his house in Bywater. There was a leaf missing from the table, but the two ends were pushed close enough together to support the jack-o-lantern. He dressed as a scarecrow and perched motionlessly on a nearby stone wall. A friend, Gene Gurley, got under the table and pushed his head up inside the jack-o-lantern through a hole in the bottom.

The stage was set. A group of costumed children would approach. They'd go to the table, look both ways, and nervously reach for the candy. And the jack-o-lantern would intone, "Just take one."

"And, they'd run screaming back down the walk and grab their daddy's leg and he'd be trying to scrape them off so he could run too," says Hurtt. Then the scarecrow nobody had paid any attention to, would come to life and let out a shriek.

"That would given them a little boost along," he adds. "Five minutes later they'd come back with their friends, to give them a scare."

Grown-ups turning the tables on kids. When will Peter Pan grow up? Maybe never.

"Every year, after I finish scaring the kids, I would go on down to the French Quarter and let people scare me," says Hurtt.

And there are plenty things to see, as various ethereal beings drift from bar to bar, rubbing elbows with wearers of black leather and with those whose pierced body parts, tattoos and hair in primary colors are just part of their everyday appearance.

But, it isn't only locals who wander the French Quarter that night. Not by a long shot, More visitors pour in every year, because they are enthralled by Anne Rice's vampire books; or because they have heard New Orleans is the voodoo capital of the world, a city that is comfortable with the dead, with its jazz funerals and above-ground cemeteries; or because they just connect the city with costumes and masking.

Among events which have recently become annual attractions are the Vampire Lestat Fan Club's annual Gathering of the Coven and the four days of parties sponsored by Halloween's in New Orleans, which benefits Lazarus House, a hospice for people with AIDS. Its highlight is an affair on the Robin Street wharf at which some 4,000 caroused in costume last year.

Then there's the Decadence Ball, a magnificently weird costume extravaganza held in some warehouse or other, and sponsored by a loosely organized group led by Robyn Halversen. (The ball is not to be confused with Southern Decadence, the gay celebration held over the Labor Day weekend.

And, this year Halloween is taking a new kind of commercial twist with a 15-float procession designed by Blaine Kern. Called "The Spirits of Nemesis," it will look like a Mardi Gras parade and it will sound like a Mardi Gras parade, but it will have what Mardi Gras has never allowed -- corporate sponsorship. Float riders employees and guests of sponsoring companies -- will throw Halloween candy, Mardi Grad-type throws and trinkets with company logos,

It will begin at City Park, travel up Canal Street and N. Rampart, winding through the Warehouse Destrict, and ending at the Convention Center with a Monster Bash that will last into the wee hours of All Saints Day, according to Lee Ascani, the parade's co-founder and director, and president of Ascani Enterprises Inc.

Of course, commercializing Halloween is nothing new. Pumpkin farmers and candy makers have been taking advantage of it for decades. And when parents panicked over national news stories warning of razors and pins in trick or treats, hospitals scored a public relations coup by offering to X-ray each child's booty.

And in the suburbs, a pumpkin on the doorstep is not enough. Now there are graveyards made of styrofoam tombstones on front lawns, bats dangling from crepe myrtles and inflatable skeletons propped behind azaleas. The Accent Annex chain, which at other times specializes in Carnival throws and school fair items, has, in the past few years, found itself doing a booming business in the dark and dreadful.

"They want everything: house decorations, costumes, masks, fake blood, fingernails, teeth. it gets bigger every year," says Delilah Lombard, a store employee.

Meanwhile, back at the real cemeteries, the All Saints Day crowds have thinned. When her mother founded the Quality Flower Shop on Canal Street in 1936, nobody in the family had time for Halloween hi-jinks, says Doris Bottinelli Vobel. Often as not they'd pile into a truck that night and head for Ponchatoula to get more flowers: yellow and white mums, or rosebuds to weave into flower rosaries or wagon wheels with one spoke missing commemorating the loss of a family member. Police were assigned to direct traffic around the cemeteries.

There are still lines at cemeteries near Canal Boulevard and Metairie Road, but their numbers are nothing compared to what they once were, says Voebel. And police at the old St. Louis I and II are there to protect visitors and also to see what vandals wrought the night before.

All Saints Day is no longer a school holiday, for most students. If you happen to miss work, the boss does not assume you took time off to visit Mamare's tomb. He figures you indulged too much the night before.

And he's probably right.
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