Hallowe'en, like the pumpkins in the shops, is getting bigger every year. It's vying with Christmas as the most popular holiday with children, whose parents are spending more on costumes, props, sweets and decorations than ever before.
My own three-year-old was disappointed to discover that the witch's broom I bought him in Tesco didn't really fly. "Make it fly, Mum," he implored, forcing me to demonstrate in the garden.
This weekend Irish housing estates will turn into versions of the US suburbs as children dressed as ghosts, witches, vampires, Pikachus, princesses, aliens and WWF wrestlers go door to door with goodie bags shouting "trick or treat".
There's a magic to it as the nights draw in and pumpkins light windows and halls. Children love the sense of spookiness and danger. It's the one time of year when we give official recognition to death and the spirit world, things that children seem to hunger for knowledge of.
But it's not all innocence. The older and bolder among them look with disgust at the sweets and hope for coinage so they can go off and buy cider. And in some areas, Hallowe'en is a licence to commit wholesale vandalism, ignite small munitions and light bonfires. Tonight, and for the next three nights, there will be even more drunkenness, violence and mayhem than usual.
The burgeoning witchcraft movement looks down its long, hooked, warty nose at all this nonsense. It sees Hallowe'en as a key religious occasion. Wicca regards Hallowe'en as a day to remember and honour the dead; a tradition which began with Christianity, of all things, when it declared All Saints' Day on November 1st.
Today's witches see Samhain as a day when the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead is thinner than usual, and the growing number of Wicca practitioners will be using the opportunity for otherworldly travel through meditation, visualisaion and astral projection.
Witchcraft in its 21st-century guise is a benign, Satan-free zone populated by incense-burning, tree-hugging vegetarians and it is popular with impressionable pubescents who cast spells in their bedrooms after they've grown out of Barbie, encouraged by TV shows like Charmed, Sabrina the Teen- age Witch and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
The conventional wisdom is that Hallowe'en is a commercial American holiday that has made its way to Irish culture through Hollywood. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Hallowe'en, originally called Samhain, is Irish through and through and travelled to the US with Irish emigrants in the 19th century. Some modern witches have bought into 18th-century claims that Samhain was the name of the Druidic Lord of the Dead, although there is no evidence of this in pre-Christian Celtic mythology.
Samhain, derived from "sam" and "fuin", means summer's end and began as a celebration of the turn of the year, from light to darkness. October 31st lies between the autumnal equinox and winter solstice. By that day, the last harvest was completed and animals were slaughtered for the winter. There was absolutely nothing Satanic about it.
Seumus MacManus, in his book The Story of the Irish Race, describes the beginning of the new yearly cycle not as a celebration of evil and the underworld but as a time for feasting, parliaments and formal games. An American academic, W.J. Bethancourt III, writes that Samhain got its evil reputation as a time of orgies, human sacrifice, cannabilism and atheism from the Druids' mortal enemies, the Roman Empire, which used scare tactics to justify their belief that the Celts were the ultimate enemy.
Some typical first-century Roman anti-Celt propaganda can be found in the Octavius of Minicus Felix, which describes disgusting scenes of infant sacrifice and sex between people of all ages.
Bethancourt comments: "A culture-wide Celtic celebration of evil would certainly be something which cultural anthropologists would jump on, since it would require hundreds of tribes/clans in several separated geographical areas to be doing something that no other major human culture has ever done, that is, to define evil and good, and consciously celebrate evil.
"Such a culture would not be expected to adopt Christianity as quickly and easily, not to mention as strongly, as the Celtic peoples did, would it?"
As for black cats, they have nothing at all to do with the real Irish Samhain and seem to have emerged from the melting pot of cultures that colonised the US. Cats are associated with the Norse goddess Freya; in medieval France, cats were thrown on bonfires, but on St John's Eve in June and on the first Sunday in Lent, not on Hallowe'en. The custom was abolished by King Louis XIV in 1648.
CHRISTIANITY'S recognition of Hallowe'en came in 835, when Pope Gregory moved All Saints' (Hallows) Day from February 21st to November 1st, and from that point Catholic horror stories about purgatory and legends about Hallowe'en got mixed up, and all we have is hearsay, legend and the traditions we continue to this day, in our own commercial way.
Those Jack O'Lanterns apparently come from an Irish legend about Jack of the Lantern, a man who could enter neither heaven nor hell and was condemned to wander through the night with only a candle in a turnip for light (not as attractive as a candelit pumpkin).
There's a belief that candles that flicker on Hallowe'en night have been touched by the spirits of dead ancestors, a superstition which can only have come out of the church itself, since it tied Hallowe'en, a celebration day in itself, to purgatory by making All Saints' Day November 1st.
As for the chocolate consumption, don't blame the Irish. The trick-or-treat aspect of the holiday started in 1930s in the US and was derived, apparently, from the tradition of Hogmanay in Scotland, when people went door to door asking for donations of money or food for the New Year's feast and placed tricks on those who didn't comply.
Yes, I know that Hogmanay is on January 1st, but a lot of Hallowe'en traditions don't make a lot of sense, do they? I can see The Irish Times letters page hopping already.
