Big Pumpkin: How a sinister cabal of pumpkin farmers is behind the rise of Halloween

Four years ago, for reasons best known to itself, the Yorkshire Post quoted me as an authority on the way Halloween has supplanted Bonfire Night as a British folk festival.

Two years before that, I had written in my much-mourned (by me) New Statesman column Calder's Comfort Farm:

I’ve got no time for Trick or Treat. It’s just demanding money with menaces and, in the South of England at least, a recent import from America. Worse, paranoid modern parents insist on accompanying their children, trailing behind them with big soppy grins. 

A Penny for the Guy was more my style: good, honest begging with a token creative effort thrown in. Children spent hours shivering on street corners before blowing themselves up with fireworks. That sort of thing builds character.

I now think I know what is behind all this.

Halloween is being promoted in Britain by a sinister cabal of pumpkin farmers. Follow the money - it's Big Pumpkin.

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