All Blog Posts from Couric & Co.

For many kids, there is more "trick" than "treat" this Halloween. Across the country, parents in neighborhoods hit hard by foreclosures say they'll drive their little ghosts, goblins and witches someplace else tonight so they can make the rounds on streets not lined with abandoned houses. From Florida to Nevada to Michigan, there are places were 20, 50, even 75 percent of homes are empty.

But amid those grim statistics, it's heartening to hear a story like Tracy Orr's. She was ready to watch as her Pottsboro, Texas, home was auctioned last weekend, only to have a stranger, moved by her tears, buy it back for her. Marilyn Mock put in the winning bid without even seeing a picture of the house or knowing much about the distraught woman beside her.

A legend here at CBS News, Charles Kuralt, may have said it best: "The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines."

Happy Halloween, everyone.

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Christina Ruffini is a CBS News broadcast associate based in Washington. As of yet, she is uncommitted ... to a Halloween costume.

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It's down to the wire. The big day is rapidly approaching. You know there is a choice to be made, but you just can't stomach your options. It's the same recycled characters, the same hackneyed ideas, the same old party lines. There is no new blood, just the familiar red corn syrup and painted vampire fangs of Octobers past.

But with all you've had to think about lately, your Halloween costume might be pretty far down on the list. It is difficult to justify the purchase of full-body Stormtrooper armor or a historically-accurate Scarlett O'Hara hoopskirt when your 401(k) just dropped 30 percent. And how can you be expected to choose which Power Ranger or Teletubby you want to be when the only colors on your mind are red and blue?

The impending election has possessed many to pick politically themed day-of-the-dead duds. After all, what more colorful characters could there be than the ones running for office? Latex masks of Barak Obama and John McCain are popping up faster than plastic yard signs, and if the sale of beehive-ish wigs is any indication, bespectacled Sarah Palins will be as ubiquitous this season as sexy nurses and sultry cats.

But those of who don't want to end up just another Democratic doppelganger or Republican running mate must find a way to rise above the partisan pack. An Obama mask is nothing new, but pair it with a suit covered in pennies, nickels and pages from an old atlas and you can be "Obama's Map for Change." McCain's mug is musty, so combine him with a large Stetson, six-shooters and a Mel Gibson DVD, to become ...

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Michelle Miller is a CBS News correspondent based in New York.

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It’s been going on for years – the adult-ification of Halloween dress-up. We're talking teens and tweens wearing mini mini-skirts, fishnets and midriff-baring tops.

Where does it come from? Pop culture. In every age group, trend-setting girls seek out idols from the next-older group. Example: five- to 10-year-olds are watching Hannah Montana, who’s 14. Tweens are looking to Brittany Spears and Lindsay Lohan. True teens are looking to celebrities solidly in their 20’s. (This isn’t just on Halloween – it’s every day.)

While reporting on the story I’m working on for tonight, I saw costumes for tweens from the slightly-more-revealing-than-necessary (midriff-baring pirates, flirty milkmaids) to what some call slutty (a far-from-full-coverage strawberry? Come on!). Some parents probably long for the days when the costumes their little ones chose looked nothing like something from the pages of Playboy.

It’s not just that kids see dressing in a revealing manner as fun, flirty and adult, but sometimes there's little choice. Some mothers I spoke with lamented the state of the costume-store selection. So many are altering these store-bought outfits. One told me her daughter would be wearing a bodysuit under her costume so she doesn’t have to show her midriff.

Old favorites, like pumpkins and ghosts, are still going door-to-door, but Freddie Kruger will need to make room for little ghouls gone wild.

Hari Sreenivasan is a CBS News correspondent based in Dallas.

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Jeffrey Weidenhamer comes across as a mild-mannered, matter-of-fact chemistry professor from Ashland University in Ohio, but get him started on the amount of lead in products on store shelves today, and you'll begin to hear a combination of the urgency, disappointment and frustration in his measured voice.

On top of the courses he teaches, he has been cajoling grad students and volunteers to come in on Saturdays and help him test for high levels of lead in the trinkets, metal jewelry and plastic toys that he finds all too readily available in the cheapest discount stores around him.

His sadness flows from the fact that his ad-hoc group is perhaps able to spend more time testing all these products than the Consumer Products Safety Commission — an agency which has been complaining to congress on its antiquated facilities, limited resources, low levels of staffing and inability to nab every dangerous product landing on U.S. shores.

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Correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi has been sizing up some of the costumes for sale this Halloween, and reports they've changed since she was growing up... -- Ed.

When I was little, I was terrified of Halloween. I wanted the candy, but couldn’t bear to wear a Vampire, Monster or Witch costume. For a few years, I went as “Thor - God of Thunder”. I wore a winged cap and roller skates just in case I need to quickly “out-skate” anything evil. This, of course, made sense at the time.

When I got older and more mature, I switched to a cheerleader costume that my mother made for me. (That's me on the left, by the way, shaking my pompons.) Being a “good Catholic” mom, she made sure my skirt reached well below my knees and I wore shorts underneath “just in case.” I thought I looked so grown-up. By today’s Halloween standards, not so much.

All of the sudden, Halloween has become about dressing like a tramp. I don’t care what adults do. Dress as a Pirate Whore, if that’s your thing. But who in the world buys their child a French Maid’s costume?! Someone does, because they’re selling them…. for NINE YEAR OLDS! Will someone please explain to me what is scary about a Feather Duster? What has happened to Halloween?

During the course of reporting our story that ran on last night’s Evening News, we found that a lot of teenagers and pre-teens are having trouble finding a costume that isn’t sexy. 12-year-old Julia Schwarz wanted to go as Super Woman this Halloween. She is too old to wear a children’s’ costume, too young to wear the adult “Super Girl” costume they sell in the stores. (By the looks of THAT costume, Super Girl didn’t have a father --because if she did, he wouldn’t have let her out of the house in that skirt.) Frustrated by the lack of costume choices, Julia wrote a letter to the New York Times complaining about the revealing costumes. Then, she picked up her scissors and some felt and created her own Super Woman costume. It looks fantastic.

I might suggest she also gets a pair of roller skates, too. Just in case she needs to “out-skate” the French Maids.

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“One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.” - Emily Dickinson, perhaps thinking of something more frightening than Halloween ...

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It's the day before Halloween. So here's a word to get you in the mood:

diablerie(dee-OB-luh-ree) noun. 1. Sorcery; black magic; witchcraft. 2. Representation of devils or demons in words or pictures. 3. Mischievous conduct; deviltry.

Diablerie comes from the French, from diable, devil, from Latin diabolus, from Greek diabolos, "slanderer," from diaballein, "to slander," literally "to throw across," from dia-, "across" + ballein, "to throw."

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What are your kids wearing for Halloween?

Katie's looked at the costumes on the shelves this year, and finds a lot of them scary -- for all the wrong reasons.

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