I’ve finally come to have affection for Halloween

While despising its commercialisation, Will Gore cannot deny the joy his children find in the ghostly festivities of All Hallows’ Eve

Spookily cute: a Halloween party (Getty)

Halloween passed me by as a child. Maybe the UK was still on a break from the festival, before it was reimported from the United States. Or perhaps it was just something that “other people” did. Certainly, the notion of trick or treating was very much frowned upon in our house, though I have vague memories of masked children occasionally turning up and being given a biscuit.

When I moved to London in my twenties, I studiously kept the lights off at the front of our flat on Halloween and ignored any knocking at the door. This was partly through embarrassment at never having remembered to buy any treats to hand over to the little kids; and partly for fear that some older tricksters would throw an egg at me and haunt my dreams.

The truth is, I don’t have the chutzpah to front up to unwanted guests on the doorstep, unlike previous generations of my family. My grandmother would recite the Nicene Creed to Jehovah’s Witnesses before they could get a word in edgeways, while my mother once forced some teenage carol singers, who had performed a desultory “We Wish You a Merry Christmas”, to join her in a rendition of “Away in a Manger”.