Look, it was Halloween when I wrote this, so of course it’s about Halloween! Maybe you’ve forgotten but it was inescapable back then (at time of writing, now). Pumpkins, plastic spiders and spray-on cobwebs everywhere. Everyone changing their names online to include more “ooo”s or to otherwise rhyme with the cliches of terror. A fascist winning an election in Brazil. It’s a weird time.

OK, I know it’ll probably blow over. You, in the near yet unimaginable future of Sunday, may no longer be living in a society obsessed with the trappings of horror. But that’s not how it feels. It feels very very Halloweeny at the moment and I think it’s incredibly patronising of you to start bonking me on the head with your hindsight stick from the broad sunlit uplands of the day before a Catholic terrorist gets burned in effigy. Suddenly, that’s fine, is it?! Watching his face crackle to bits while you sip your outdoor soup, you hypocrites!

The reason I’m so nervous about Halloween is that the Church of England is taking it very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that it was reported last week that it has sent out “a pack” to churches. I haven’t seen the pack, but apparently it aims to encourage children towards more wholesome alternatives to the ghoulish darkness of Halloween.

“As Christians, we are rightly uneasy about the celebration of the dark side of life,” says Mary Hawes, the C of E’s national children and youth adviser, in the pack. “But folding our arms, putting on a disapproving face and being negative is unlikely to woo families away from what they see as a harmless bit of fun. Too often, Christians are perceived as killjoys, rather than those who are living life in its fullness.”

So how do you kill the joy of Halloween without looking like a killjoy? Easy! You replace the dead joy with better, nicer, lighter joy! Instead of trick or treating, for example, Ms Hawes suggests that “groups of children dressed in hero costumes, along with responsible adults, [could] take treats to the houses in the community, including a card with a simple illustration and Bible verse”. And instead of a Halloween party, have a “saints party”: “Invite everyone to come dressed as a saint. Have saint-themed activities and food and tell the stories of saints across the ages.”

A child dressed as a saint meekly coming to the door and handing out biblical quotations? That’s terrifying

On the face of it, these sound like the lamest ideas since the Amstrad Emailer, but think about it: a child dressed as a saint meekly coming to the door and handing out biblical quotations? That’s terrifying – that’s like an actual ghost. It’s going to scare people infinitely more than fluffy werewolf costumes and chocolate-smudged sheets with eyeholes – and probably slightly more than a looming 15-year-old wearing a pumpkin baseball cap (so that, in theory, it’s not a mugging). Similarly, a party where stories of the saints are told is bound to be heavily agonising-death-themed. Suddenly, all the plastic bats seem quite bland.

But I don’t think Ms Hawes’s intention was to spice up Halloween with spine-tingling reflections on the savage martyring of the faithful or centuries of tragically high child mortality rates – although our uncomfortable sense of the proximity of the innocent and the horrific, of the pure and the tainted, of the holy and unholy, is absolutely where Halloween sprang from. The eve of the sacred festival of All Saints’ Day was when evil spirits, and ancient pagan phantoms, were believed to enjoy a last big knees-up (or wings-, claws- and tentacles-up) before the saints came marching in – a night of anarchic riot notwithstanding the omnipotence of God.

The pack’s aim certainly wasn’t to return to that light and shade or to assert that the devilish, just as much as the sacred, is squarely within the ecclesiastical remit. People don’t distribute packs in order to restore nuance. And this is clearly a particularly unnuanced pack: it accepts at face value the fact that Halloween is ostensibly about darkness and nastiness and then suggests it would be better if it were replaced by something about lightness and niceness.

For example, the holding of “light parties”. This is an idea from the Scripture Union, the director of which, the Rev Tim Hastie-Smith, said: “In stark contrast to all the scary costumes and a focus on darkness, we can provide something different, an alternative that reflects the light of Jesus and shows love to our communities.” The archbishop of Canterbury described this stultifying prospect as “a more exciting celebration” and “a real gift to parents and children alike”. A real gift to people who say Christians are boring, more like.

This scheme may be well-meaning, which is presumably why the usually wise and insightful Justin Welby felt constrained to support it, but it’s idiotically simplistic and therefore a complete waste of time. Halloween isn’t really about anything nasty at all. It’s not even primarily about spookiness. It’s about the big in-joke of affecting spookiness, the collective adoption of cartoonised versions of traditionally negative imagery, purely because it’s fun and it makes a change and it’s something to do.

Obviously the retail sector massively eggs us on because it can make some money out of it. But why not? The thing that’s been commercialised was never a wholesome festival of joy, like Christmas or Easter or even St Valentine’s Day. It used to be grim and superstitious; now it’s lighthearted and chocolatey.

Lightheartedness is the key. A house near mine has been decorated for Halloween. It’s mainly cobwebs and fake spiders, but they’ve also put up some police incident tape. It amused me because of the juxtaposition of the two very different conventionally horrifying things: spiders and violent crime. One’s more cartoonish than the other, but I liked how they’re brought together by the Halloween aesthetic and I’m not worried that the householders seriously think spiders are evil or that crime is trivial.

Fundamentally, Halloween is a humorous reversal. We take bad, frightening or horrific things and treat them as if they’re good because it’s a funny thing to do. That’s not a step into genuine darkness at all. It relies completely on a shared moral compass.