As you drag yourself out of bed this morning (it’s mandatory that one sleeps in today as it’s both a return to standard time, as in you get one more hour’s pillow time, plus Halloween fell on a Saturday so one can indulge a little more than usual, that’s chocolate silly), hopefully safely surviving another Oct. 31 it’s easy to get nostalgic about the non-holiday (only a day off warrants holiday status) festivities.

And the reason it’s easy to get nostalgic is because if you live in Enderby there wasn’t even a fireworks display last night.

Apparently the fire department became aware of regulations that have changed the amount of area needed for fireworks debris to fall within, suddenly rendering Riverside Park an unsuitable location (you know the same location they’ve been safely shooting off fireworks for years now).

The fire chief says the zone used to be 100 metres but now it’s 200 metres and that puts several residences in peril, even though those residences never knew they were in peril all those years, and not to mention, ironically, the firefighters are very close at hand if by some one-in-a-million chance something did happen.

But don’t blame the firefighters.

“The liability issues would be huge if we kept firing from there,” said the chief.

He’s right.

So, blame the lawyers.

Well, we could, and that would be fun and not exactly wrong, but that’s a tad superficial and besides, I know some lawyers, and they’re not all evil, although if you want to go as one next Halloween that’s OK too.

Just kidding. Please, no letters with fancy letterhead, OK?

No, it’s more about our modern-day quest to make everything safe and risk-free and have it written down somewhere in a regulation or bylaw and all that stuff......especially when it comes to our kids.

We don’t trust anybody (you should see the stuff going around on the Internet about the H1N1 flu vaccine, yikes). It could have something to do with the fact we don’t know anybody anymore (including our neighbours, who, ironically, we might see once a year on Halloween) but that’s a column for another day.

A few years ago I wrote a column painting a picture of a family with four sons in a Chevy Malibu station wagon, none of the kids in a seatbelt, in fact one or two of them likely in the very back without even a seat, driving home from Hall’s Gift Shop in downtown Vernon with enough fireworks and firecrackers to blow up a small doghouse.

Of course this scene would be from the 1970s and no one would think that my parents and brothers and I were doing anything wrong as we made our way home to celebrate a Halloween tradition (for liability reasons I should probably add a line about how wonderful and responsible my parents were and still are as they successfully and safely raised four sons).

The same scene today would have the station wagon pulled over by the cops, huge tickets issued for no seatbelts and car seats, illegal explosives confiscated with at least another fine, and the officer trying to decide whether he should contact family services about parents who obviously have no concern for the well-being of their poor, misguided kids.

Actually these days he might contact CSIS as well cause these people could be terrorists. Interrogation at least is in order. Just what were they going to blow up anyway?

Food for thought, for the day after Halloween 2009. Makes you wonder what Oct. 31, 2019 will be like, don’t it?