It’s a scary time of year. That peculiar holiday called Halloween is upon us, the only occasion wherein we encourage our children to take candy from strangers — after the kiddos issue a vague threat to the homeowner.

Trick-or-treating is a grand tradition that dates back centuries. I know this because I participated in trick-or-treating when I was a youngster.

There were no commercially produced Halloween costumes back then. At least there weren’t for my seven siblings and me. Kitting out that many kids would have meant that my parents would have lost money in the candy-to-costume expense ratio. It would have been cheaper to simply buy a pile of chocolate bars.

But as we vociferously pointed out to our parents, that would have been no fun. Besides, there would be classroom Halloween parties at school, and no self-respecting kid would ever pass up the opportunity to wear something weird in school. This was obviously before “goth” became a thing.

Left with no choice, we scoured the pile of our parents’ old clothing — we didn’t throw out anything back then — for something that could, with a liberal application of imagination, be repurposed into a Halloween costume.

For my sisters, an old, flowery skirt and a scarf tied around the head transformed them into gypsies. For us boys, a pair of dad’s old bib overalls stuffed with straw transmogrified us into scarecrows. Being a scarecrow was an itchy business, but the thought of filling our shopping bags with candy made us believe that it would be worth it.

We lived on a dairy farm, so trick-or-treating had to wait until after milking and chores were finished. I suppose we could have gone trick-or-treating on foot, but that would have meant walking several miles in the dark. And let’s face it, late October is a dark and foreboding time of year.

At long last, we’d pile into our 1959 Ford station wagon and Mom would drive us to neighborhood farms. It must have been quite a sight when the homeowner opened the door to see a herd of gypsies and scarecrows of various sizes, all of them holding paper shopping bags and smelling like a dairy barn.

Clifford and Aletta Tisdel would hand out homemade popcorn balls. They were delicious and had the added benefit of being unwrapped, which meant that you could start scarfing them down as you walked back to the car.

One year our neighbor Jess Alexander answered the door with a bright red clown nose on his schnoz. I had known Jess for all my seven years and was spooked by his appearance. He grinned broadly and plucked the scarlet bulb from his nose. I was relieved to see that it was just the same old Jess.

Until recently, I thought that I was done with alarming October scares.

The latest fright came in the form of a form letter from my health care provider. The letter explained, in bureaucratese, that they would no longer work with the insurance company that provides our Medicare supplement. Reading between the lines, I gathered that it boiled down to the money. The bean counters always get the last word.

I had assumed that we would simply continue with our current insurance company. But my wife and I were abruptly tossed into the horror house called Open Enrollment.

I have no beef with our health care system. When I underwent treatment for tonsil cancer last year, everything ran as smoothly as a very expensive sewing machine. And the results were all that I could have hoped for. A recent PET scan revealed a complete response to the treatments. My doctor said that I had a perfect PET, and he hadn’t even met our cat, Sparkles.

My wife and I now find ourselves navigating the nightmarish swamp of deductibles and premiums.

What is a formulary anyway?

It sounds like a factory where they make liquid nourishment for babies.

It shouldn’t be this hard. We shouldn’t have to learn the ins and outs of insurance-speak in a 54-day window. There are folks who have been in the insurance industry for decades and still don’t understand how it works. Just ask any commission-minded insurance agent.

What is underwriting anyway?

Is it something you do beneath a table?

Or is it a form of scribbling that involves your skivvies?

These and other questions were tumbling around in my skull the other day at the barbershop. Seated across from me in the waiting area me was a human skeleton. He had probably expired while waiting for an urgently needed haircut.

“Poor guy,” I thought. “I guess he couldn’t figure out all that in-network or out-of-network gobbledygook either.”

— Jerry’s book, “Dear County Agent Guy” can be found at www.workman.com and in bookstores nationwide.