OH, THE HORROR, THE HORROR OF UPPER EAST SIDE HALLOWEEN DÉCOR: The New York Times gets the vapors* over Big Apple Halloween decorations:

At no point is the East Side’s submission to child-centeredness more aggressively in evidence than in the days leading up to Oct. 31; we are now in the era of what one Park Avenue exile calls “a hedge-fund Halloween.” By this she means the relatively new tradition among town-house owners, mostly between Fifth Avenue and Lexington Avenue, to appoint the stoops and facades of their buildings as if someone had asked them to enact a particular 0.01 percent nightmare: “Imagine that you’d failed to acquire some of the most expensive real estate on earth. Pretend you lived in Brooklyn instead, and not in Cobble Hill but in Dyker Heights, that distant precinct famous for its polyvinyl snowmen and street-clogging paeans to Christmas.”

In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle exclaimed with a straight face, “There is nothing more bacchanalian than a kid’s birthday party.” For the dowager Gray Lady, the public exuberance of Halloween is evidently worse. (And as the last sentence quoted above hints, don’t even get them started on Christmas The Holiday That Dare Not Speak Its Name.)

* But then, what doesn’t the Margaret Dumont of Eighth Avenue get the vapors over these days?

RELATED: School Officials: No Halloween Celebrations In Phoenixville District This Year, CBS-Philadelphia reports.