Halloween 2015: A nation of zombies embraces America’s imported nonsense and empties its wallets

Donald MacInnes remains unmoved, cynical and resolutely not terrified

Like dead-eyed, vampiric monsters, the big supermarkets have spent the past few weeks enticing Brits into their faux-scary lairs, promising thrills unmatched – only then to sink their unforgiving fangs into our income stream and drain us dry. We respond to this fiscal violation by waving our contactless cards around like Harry Potter wands, leaving the premises laden with pumpkins, plastic bats and more cobweb-in-a-can than we will ever need – basically, all of the Scooby Doo vestments of Halloween.

As my little boy grows up, we may have to buy into this imported American nonsense, but for now I remain unmoved, cynical and resolutely not terrified.

I first noticed the bloated US obsession with the 31st day of October many years ago, during one of my annual trips to visit my sister in Florida. I tended to travel there in late autumn, mainly because the climate is at its most tolerable then, with the late summer hurricanes having abated and the mosquitos taking a breather from all the raging sucking.

Every year, I got more and more amazed at the scale of the American approach to Halloween. Unlike in this country, where it took a distant back seat to fireworks fight, the Guy Fawkes-free calendar in the US meant Halloween was the be-all-and-end-all – certainly until the next holiday, Thanksgiving, trundled into view in late November.

I would return to the UK and be grateful that our take on the old festival was largely to ignore it, unless you were an under-10. Yes, there would be the odd grown-up fancy dress party but nothing on the scale of post-millennial Britain, which, in its massive swallowing of the Halloween pill, seems to be morphing into some kind of abominable new New Jersey – or, as Matt Johnson of The The observed with enormous foresight in the song "Heartland" in 1986, the 51st state of the USA.

When I was a kid, back in the days when Britain was just Britain, with a healthy regard for America but without the current giggling, blushing desire to join its fraternity, Halloween was so different. For a start, we didn't go out trick or treating. In Glasgow we would go out "guising" – dressing up in whatever we could find in our parents' wardrobes to approximate fancy dress. One year, my mother pinned all of my father's ties on to my clothes. I would then announce myself as "The man from Thailand" to whoever answered their door.

And things didn't end with ringing someone's doorbell. Now kids get a handful of responsibly sourced tofu treats just for turning up, but we had to do something to earn our fun-size Mars bar – maybe sing a song or tell a joke. I would tend to have one joke ready that I would trot out at every door.

And while this incarnation of Halloween may not have swollen the coffers of Tesco or Aldi quite as much, at least we had our dignity. I'm joking, of course.