Next Wednesday, if you forget to be out, chances are that you’ll be disturbed by some overexcited children from down the road, accompanied by their mother. The children will be dressed as little devils and the mother, hanging back with an awkward smile, will be sporting a witch’s hat. A handful of sweets – or if you happen to know that the supervising witch is particularly nutritionally minded, a handful of raisins – will usually be enough to send the giggling little party on its way.

That’s if you live somewhere well-behaved. In my part of London, there will be no supervising mother, and the ring on the doorbell will be jagged, insistent and slightly menacing. What’s more, there’s always the worry that your offering of a bag of Haribo sweets will not be quite enough to keep the little devils from coming back next week with their elder brothers and demanding your stereo, laptop and £500 in cash.

This “trick or treating” is all part of the spread of an Americanised Hallowe’en, which has pretty much wiped out our own version of seasonal mayhem. Instead of celebrating the onset of winter on November 5 with Guy Fawkes Night, we now do it a few days earlier on October 31. For weeks the shops have been full of elaborate ghost and ghoul costumes (whatever happened to an old sheet with a couple of holes in it?). What’s more, fireworks, once designed specifically for November 5, have morphed into “seasonal sparklers” and “spooky bangers”.

How different it used to be. When I was growing up in the 1970s, Hallowe’en barely mattered. If, like me, you had a birthday somewhere in October, then you might find that apple-bobbing was one of the games your parents put on for your party, grateful to have found something to relieve the tedium of musical chairs.

And, before anyone hauls in the argument about Hallowe’en being essentially an agricultural festival and therefore not relevant to little girls who had grown up in the decade of Charlie’s Angels, let me tell you that this was rural Sussex and we knew all about the importance of marking the end of harvest. We just didn’t do it by dressing up as goblins.

What we were saving our energy for was Guy Fawkes Night, which happened barely a week later. That was our festival of light, our end-of-season carnival, our defiant “do your worst!” welcome to the cold winter months. We spent weeks assembling our Guy from straw, stuffing and Dad’s old clothes. On the night, we burnt him in a blaze of glory (half-conscious that he resembled a scarecrow whose services were now no longer necessary) and traced our names with sparklers. Then, on the nearest Saturday, it was off to Lewes for the torchlit street processions, accompanied by rolling barrels of tar.

These days you’d be hard-pressed to find a good Bonfire Night celebration, since all that seasonal energy has gone into Hallowe’ en. And, although it would be easy to blame it on cultural colonisation, the fact is that we gave the Americans Hallowe’en rather than the other way round. Our Celtic ancestors celebrated Samhain, their New Year’s Eve, on October 31, which was then tidied up into All Hallows’ Eve by the Christian church in the 11th century. Nor was tricking invented, like Santa Claus, by Macy’s in the early 20th century but was something that apprentice boys used to do on Mischief Night (November 4) by rampaging round town, knocking on doors and switching shop signs.

The treating, meanwhile, is probably rooted in the old medieval traditions of hospitality, whereby a householder felt obliged to give succour to any strangers or travel-lers who presented themselves at your hearth.

Yet, despite doing all it could to leech out pagan associations from All Hallows’ Eve, the established church still worried about the whiff of anarchic energy that surrounded the early winter festival. Which is why, when Guy Fawkes tried to blow up Parliament in 1605, prior to putting a Roman Catholic on the throne, he unwittingly did everyone a favour. Celebrating Fawkes’s defeat became a way of enjoying a proper community bang and crackle, while at the same time making it abundantly clear that God was an Englishman (it was, after all, the endurance of the Church of England that we were celebrating).

Recent worries about giving offence to religious minorities probably explain why Guy Fawkes Night has increasingly been turned into Bonfire Night before being quietly phased out. Hallowe’en, with its roots in prehistory, is so culturally fuzzy that it is unlikely to offend anyone other than the sort of ultra-evangelicals who complain about Harry Potter.

All the same, it seems a shame that we have given up Guy Fawkes quite so easily. November 5 is a British festival, particular to us rather than part of some bland globalisation. We may have given the Americans Hallowe’en but I, for one, would be quite happy to let them keep it.

The real treat is for retailers

Spending on Hallowe’en far outstrips Bonfire Night, mainly because government restrictions limit the sale of fireworks to a three-week window. Shops have cottoned on and push Hallowe’en instead. According to Woolworths, spending on costumes, props and sweets has risen tenfold in six years. In 2001, spending was £14 million; this year so far, it is a record £140 million.

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