Now that another Halloween has come and gone, I can’t help but think that maybe this ancient holiday is quickly losing its exalted position as one of the most anticipated days on a kid’s calendar.

How else to explain that by 6:30 p.m. Sunday, when there should have been a continuous stream of little ghouls stampeding up and down our front steps to beg for candy, my wife and I stood by the kitchen table instead and wondered if the doorbell was on the blink.

Traditionalists that we are, we reflected on our own childhoods, when Halloween was a truly exhausting candy-grab that lasted long into the evening. We recalled that just a decade ago, when our own kids were approaching the final years of their trick-or-treating life, they would return home breathlessly with no less than a couple of pillow cases that bulged with enough sweet loot to keep us all in Smarties and Snickers for weeks after.

Yet shortly after 7 p.m. on this Halloween, the meager parade of children and parents through our neighborhood had all but evaporated, causing us to shut off the lights and go out to dinner at least an hour earlier than we had anticipated. The traditional second wave of trick-or-treaters, those kids old enough to roam the streets alone and rack up the goodies, never even showed up.

Was it that all the kids in our neighborhood were grown up, with no little ones around to replace them? Could it be that parents have become so wary of the real-life goblins in the world these days that they’d rather dress up their kids and send them off to parties at schools, friends’ homes, malls or local recreation centers? While there’s probably some truth to those speculations, I think the better explanation is simply that Halloween is not just for kids any longer. In fact, the retailers say, it’s mostly an adult holiday these days.

“Adults have hijacked Halloween,” a retail analyst said in a recent story about the rapid evolution of a holiday that once was strictly kids’ stuff.

Adults now spend more than $7 billion a year on Halloween costumes, parties, house decorations and greeting cards. There are now Halloween cruises for sale, weekend Halloween hotel specials and late-night Halloween parades. With an estimated 50 million people hosting or attending parties, Halloween has become the nation’s third-biggest adult party day, after New Year’s and Super Bowl Sunday. Our local costume purveyors have been suggesting the phenomenon for a few years now. At the Castle of Costumes in Bangor, for instance, the adult-costume market has grown so large in the last decade or so that the owners don’t even bother renting out children’s costumes anymore.

While I don’t begrudge grown-ups a bit of macabre fantasy, it would appear that some of them should take lessons from the kids on how to behave responsibly during their night of revelry. According to Monday’s USA Today, police in riot gear had to use pepper spray to disperse a crowd of about 5,000 Halloween partyers in Madison, Wis., after they started throwing things, fighting in the streets, setting off smoke bombs and lighting fires. Meanwhile, in Boulder, Colo., SWAT teams arrested 18 people in costumes who chose to celebrate Halloween by getting hammered and then hurling rocks and bottles at police.

Compared to that, old-fashioned Halloween mischief such as smashing the occasional pumpkin in the street or tossing an egg or two at a house seems like mere child’s play.