Pumpkins? When did they sneak in? I don’t remember seeing those in the supermarket. They were only spotted on television, never IRL. And now, from Durham to Doncaster, you’ll spot these bloated orange chancers in the aisles from September onwards, luring you into the Americanisation of Halloween. Shame on them! 

A quick eyeball on the world wide web for stats tells me it’s now the 3rd biggest ‘retail event’ in the British shopping calendar, after Christmas and Easter. Almost 700 million hard-earned quids were wasted last year on pure tat! Who mandated this nonsense?! Call the police! 

A Celtic creation by trade, the so-called celebrations on 31 October weren’t always about sexy nurses, faces smeared in fake blood, or blokes waddling to the pub in suspenders and a matted blonde wig. Ancient folk marked the start of their new year on 1 November, so Halloween was, essentially, a massive piss-up. Gallons of mead were guzzled to signal the end of harvest and the beginning of winter, in a festival they called Samhain (pronounced sow-in). 

Being ‘ye olde worlde’ types with no access to the internet (to fact-check), they believed the boundary between the living and the dead was blurred on 31 October. Apparently ghosts returned to earth that night, so bonfires were lit and animal skins were donned to scare the bejesus out of passing evil spirits. We’ve come a long way since then – nowadays Tesco sells green plastic witch fingers and skeleton onesies for toddlers. Progress.

Don’t go thinking I’m a miserable git. As a kid I got behind the bobbing of apples (always a good excuse to slam my sister’s head violently into a bucket of freezing cold water) and never said, “No” to a fun-size Mars bar from a neighbour during Trick or Treating. A fair few rotten eggs were pelted at the windows of tight-wads and grumpy pensioners had their gnomes rearranged as payment for not answering the door. It was lo-fi fun, and definitely not mass-manufactured. 

Understandably, the Americans have monetized this druid party. They’ve turned the jack-o’-lantern into an entire industry. Whole houses draped in factory-made cobwebs. Battery-powered jack-o’-lanterns, themed ‘scary’ food, days off work preparing for a fancy dress party. Bloody ridiculous. Maybe it’s because they don’t have Bonfire Night? (more about that next week).

What’s most depressing is that intelligent people here in the UK now drive to out-of-town pumpkin patches to spend all afternoon traipsing around a soggy field posing for Insta photos with their kids. What’s happened to us? Perhaps I should quit moaning and head out to ring a few doorbells demanding sweets.