By Robert Bicknell

Ah, one of my favorite holidays is tomorrow…yes, Halloween.

For those who don’t really understand some Western holidays, Halloween might be one of the strangest. People dress up in bizarre outfits, carve pumpkins into Jack-o-lanterns, and basically try to scare the crap out of each other.

Yes, we are a strange people.

But, for those with a sense of humor, Halloween can be a truly fun holiday. Sure, not as much fun as Song Khran in Thailand where you get to blast each other in the face with water cannons, but still a lot of fun.

Secondly, you can almost always find a really wild party where costumes range from amusing, to hilarious to downright sleazy. Yes, it’s the sleazy ones which attract all the attention…and usually make it onto YouTube.

Halloween and golf do go together in the West and some of the most fun tournaments happen on that day. Some are daytime events, which a really disturbing to people who are not so tightly wrapped and don’t expect to see ghosts, goblins, demons and witches running around the golf course, but its still fun because during the awards party things get pretty wild.

However, it’s the Night Golf events on Halloween which are really off the charts. Sometimes they are only 9-holes because the players want to have more time to party their brains out, or because the course doesn’t have lights and rely on glow-sticks.

Yes, you read that right…glow sticks. The plastic sticks filled with a liquid. You snap them, then shake them and they glow for hours. We even had glow-stick golf balls.

What they would do is set a few glowsticks on the flagsticks to give you some direction, maybe a few in the fairway so you knew which way to go. But it was the jack-o-lantern tee markers with the candle inside which really made the night special.

Naturally, the costumes worn by the players had to be practical. READ: No Capes. Swinging a golf club while wearing a cape is a sure-fire recipe for disaster. You could easily end up in the hospital.

Another costume which really is great at the party, but not during the Halloween golf tournament is the “sexy nurse” outfit. First of all, we don’t allow platform spiked heels on the golf course and the outfit kinda loses its charm when said sexy nurse is wearing FootJoys. The other problem is that costume usually features a shirt with few buttons and a few sizes too small. Trust me, the nurse’s playing partners will be quite happy before the first three holes are completed, but the sexy nurse herself probably less so. But then again, you never know. Different strokes for different folks, etc.

When we used to have these events back home in New England, it was almost always during a full moon, which lent an eerie aspect to the night. Sometimes, we would play sound effects through hidden loudspeakers just to raise the hair on a few players necks. Wolf howls, witches cackling, groans of more than a few monsters, and of course a few zombies wandering around for the fun of it.

To be honest, the golf scores were usually terrible, but that wasn’t the point of the event. It was about having a good time and really letting go of yourself for a few hours.

With all the problems in the world back then and even more so today, people need to laugh and have a good time, otherwise we will all be headed to the nearest sanitarium for shock treatments and valium enemas.

I’m actually looking forward to seeing some of this year’s costumes on YouTube and a few golf club websites. I expect Donald Trump costumes will be probably the most popular. Although I don’t know how the players can swing the club with such tiny hands. “I have birdies. I have the best birdies…sniff sniff…”

And yes, there will be undoubtedly be Hillary Clinton costumes with “lost emails” falling out of her golf bag.

The point of both golf and Halloween is to have fun. True, golf is a test of character, but what does it say about someone who cannot laugh at themselves and have a great time?

So, tomorrow night go and have fun no matter where you are.VNS