Well, you are right, I couldn’t stay shut up after all. I thought I’d got all my grumpyness out, but as October glides gently into autumn here it is again, resurfacing because ancient adult fear has turned into a kids’ bonanza.

I am talking about Hallowe’en.

I receive a lot of emails and read a lot more, from people who live in the Home of the Brave, the Land of the Free, yes Uncle Sam’s refuge for all history’s ill regulated misfits, refugees and whingers, The United States of America. Britain is rapidly going the same way, but let’s stick to our tale. In those emails, now that October has begun, I am increasingly being exhorted to “Have a Happy Hallowe’en”.  From being mildly puzzled I am developing a full-on peeve about this.

There is a Northern English and also a Scottish tradition that for children and youths, this night is Mischief Night. For one gloriously silly evening, they may play pranks that on other nights would earn them a swift clip under the ear and a complaint the following day to their parents. Door knockers might be tied together with string, black cotton tied across streets to knock off people’s hats, one man’s wheelbarrow mysteriously appropriated and filled with the potatoes of another, then run down the street until it tumbled over in the front garden of a third. Signpost arms were turned round, gates removed from their hinges and hung from tree limbs.

Groups of silly maidens sat by candlelight or by smelly turnip lanterns and told each other ghost stories. They bobbed for apples with fortunes slipped into them, cast nutshells and applepeel over their shoulders to discover the initials of future husbands. Perhaps they also played endless games of patience, or used layouts of esoteric cards to forecast their futures. Maybe they even surrounded a table bearing an upturned glass and each placed a finger upon it, in the unlikely belief that it would travel to letter after letter because within the glass, the spirit of a dead person was constrained to answer their hushed, yet trivial questions.

Here’s where the evening reflects its origins, and where I begin to become uneasy.

I am a Christian, albeit a non-practising one in that I don’t go to church, and have some doubts about interpretations of “The Scriptures”. Now, Hallowe’en is, strictly, for non-Christians.

It began as a pagan celebration: the feast of Samhain (“Sowen”), the endpoint of the annual sun cycle, the “night between the years”, the end of summer and beginning of winter. As such it was a portal to the world of the dead and a mythologically important day for magical occurrences of all kinds. In Brittany November 1st is the Day of the Dead, the opening of the Black Month. The Christian Church sanitised it into a celebration of past lives as All Souls, All Saints or All Hallows; but a reactionary element continued to celebrate its older meaning. “The night before the Feast of All Hallows” gave us the more modern names, Hallowmas, All Hallows’ Eve or Hallowe’en.

From that point of view alone, Hallowe’en is emphatically not something you should wish someone to have a happy one of, unless you know them to be of the pagan persuasion. And I am frankly furious that my University diary last year, in trying to be politically correct, noted the feast of Samhain, but ignored All Saints. Both or neither, please! I trust that my current employer, being a Christian foundation, will not make the same gaffe this year.

Tradition has it that the Hoarstones on Pendle Hill are ridden by the Devil on the Eve of All Saints; that evil spirits are abroad. It is a night when the good and the decent should wrap up tightly by their firesides to pray all good angels to defend them against the powers of darkness.

With that in mind, I am uncomfortable when I walk through a daytime supermarket and see witches’ hats on sale, along with vampire masks, cloaks and plastic broomsticks. Why should I buy trays of chocolate witches, with which to placate those juvenile Al Capones, the “trick-or-treaters” who will blackmail me on my own doorstep?

Get thee hence, Commerce. Do not make mock of the oldest fear of all; the fear of the departed dead.