I see that police in Dorset have taken to issuing posters for display tonight in households that prefer not to be disturbed by small visitors, says Frank McNally
The posters feature a witch with a red line through her and the message: "Thank you for not trick or treating". Similar posters are available from a Church of England website, which also encourages parents and children to adopt more wholesome forms of fancy dress. The campaign slogan is: "Don't go grim this Halloween."
It's not the first time the establishment has fought back against the excesses of October 31st. After all, even the event's modern name owes its origins to that old church tactic of supplanting pagan festivals with Christian ones: in this case All Hallows (or All Saints) Day.
In fact, the original attack was two-pronged. Like an upmarket airline, the church offered a split-level service in commemoration of the dead: with the saints travelling business class on November 1st, while the rest were stuck behind in the "All Souls" section - November 2nd - where there was greatly reduced leg-room.
But the tactic looks feeble now. Thanks to its more democratic approach, Halloween has risen as relentlessly as Ryanair in recent years, and is now generating similar profits. The church and the law are powerless to check its rise. Not even that ultimate authority figure of our time - the health and safety official - is a match for it.
The police posters and the website are more signs of how far this once Irish-Scottish festival has penetrated England, via the US. Of course it has been corrupted en route. To judge by some of the products now on sale in supermarkets, the event has become a tribute to that great American cultural export: the slasher movie.Yet for all the garish commercialisation, there is still a certain amusement to be had from seeing the English forced to join in. I know it's not a mature emotion. But it's as if we have forced the snooty next-door neighbours to answer their door, after ringing the bell and running away.
Multi-million industry that it has become, Halloween's central theme remains what it always was: that today is a day when the physical and spiritual worlds collide. Or at least when the boundaries between them are at their most porous, allowing mischievous spirits to pass easily back and forth across the border, like Northern pig smugglers in the 1970s.
The concept of parallel worlds meeting is nowhere more honoured than in Ireland's laws on fireworks. In the spirit world, the sale of fireworks remains illegal in the Republic. Whereas in the world that you and I live in, tonight will be like an explosion in an armaments factory.
When I look back, many of the Halloween customs of my childhood also had a spiritual element, although at the time they were mainly regarded as vandalism.
There was an obsession, for example, with removing people's gates. Similarly front doors. Not removing the doors (usually): just knocking on them or ringing the bell and then hiding. Clearly, the idea of opening all these entrances was to facilitate traffic flow between the temporal and spirit worlds. But try explaining that at the time to the guards.
I suspect the rise of corporate Halloween - with its emphasis on expensive fancy-dress - has been helped by the fact that, in general, children's lives are much safer and more sanitised than they used to be. We indulge their need to wear scary costumes to compensate them for the loss of so many other freedoms that we took for granted: such as playground equipment you could fall off.
Even so, the commercialisation is regrettable. Especially because - and excuse me waxing nostalgic here - the best Halloweens I remember were also the cheapest.
I particularly recall one that must have happened when I was about nine.
My parents were out for the evening, and my tyrannical teenage sisters were babysitting. They'll deny this now. But the first tactic they used to get my younger brother and I to bed involved one of them dressing up as the "bogeyman" and calling at the door to inquire if there were any children still awake.
Don't think badly of them, reader. Scaring the bejaysus out of small boys was fairly standard in childcare then.
In fact, the bogeyman gambit was too obvious to work. So in the end, they just ordered us to bed anyway.
There, concerned that the mischievous spirits outside could not do their work without our help, but noting that the front and back doors were under round-the-clock sister monitoring, we hatched a plan to escape, using sheets tied together and lowered from our upstairs window.
We could easily have jumped - the drop was barely eight feet - but sheets were more dramatic.
My brother was supposed to follow me down the rope. Unfortunately, discretion got the better of his valour and he went back to bed, leaving me to terrorise the neighbourhood alone.
Next morning, I woke late to find my bicycle "stolen": an event that the forces of righteousness - annoyed at my escape the night before - assured me was divine retribution.
I knew my sisters too well, however. A short search uncovered the bike where they had hidden it: in an overgrown section of the orchard. It had been a thoroughly entertaining 24 hours.
And the best thing about it is that it didn't cost a penny.