Halloween is, as Flora Watkins observes in this issue, oddly contentious for some Catholics. Granted, the festivities have come a long way from the old traditions for the season which some readers may remember growing up with in Ireland or Scotland. It is sad to see a festivity which featured bobbing for apples, harmless fortune-telling – the ring to be found in a Halloween cake, or barmbrack foretold who would be the first to marry – and children dressing up as ghosts turning into a celebration of horror movies and an orgy of chocolate consumption. This is not the simple festival of mild misrule it once was; after being taken by Irish emigrants to the United States, it has been commercialised beyond recognition.