Electric lamps in yellow plastic illuminate both religion and secularism today. Neither looks healthy. Halloween in Britain is a completely fraudulent festival, which has no more in common with traditional observances for the dead than the druids who gather around Stonehenge at midsummer have with the rites celebrated when the stones were raised. It is pointless to talk about the Christian roots of the festival. It is what it is, and no one dresses up on the day for theological reasons, or thinks of the dead as they wait for the doorbell to ring.

Yet this lack of thought and considered purpose is what has made the festival popular. It is not something for which it is necessary to believe to take part. Dressing up and playing with fear is its own reward. The candy may also help. It would be quite wrong to use the English word “sweets” since for the purposes of the ritual the children are all American, however British we are for the rest of the year.

Halloween in this sense is popular because it is neither religious nor spiritual. It does not even have the faintly disturbing sense of obligation and forgotten tradition that lurks like a taint of incense in the corners of even the brightest shopping mall at Christmas time. It is something for everyone to celebrate as much or as little as they wish, and largely in their own way. It is the opposite of evangelical, which is why it has spread so successfully. Even those churches that solemnly denounce it as satanic (and that’s another largely American invention) form part of the fun. They have put on the costume of creepy killjoys and everyone admires their performance.

Compare this exuberance with the stiff laboured efforts of organised religions, or even organised irreligion, to promote their own observances. They are all about belief or unbelief, and conscious belonging: “Have you met Jesus?” and “Have you been enlightened by Dawkins?” are equally unattractive openings to a conversation. By contrast, Halloween requires no belief, just stuff that “everybody knows” and it can be celebrated as much or as little as anyone cares.

There was a time when Christianity functioned that way in Britain, too. For centuries it was a framework that everyone knew and only the eccentric needed to consciously believe. But that’s gone now, and it won’t come back. With the end of that certainty, and with the loss of All Hallows’ Eve as a religiously celebrated festival, we have lost something profound, too. The slow accretion of meaning and tradition brings something to the observation of Christian solemnities that nothing quite consciously arranged can match, and which commercial Halloween does not even try to. Festivals of the dead and of solemn remembrance belong to late autumn when the dark comes earlier and the bright leaves fall and are trampled into glossy pavements. Behind the plastic skulls of today’s Halloween lurks something much more frightening. The lines of comic shambling zombies cannot entirely conceal Auden’s view that we are “lost in a haunted wood, children afraid of the night who have never been happy or good”.

But nostalgia is useless here. We can’t revive the past. That’s one of the things about death. If the only rituals we have are centred around plastic and imported pumpkins then we must learn to fill them with meanings of our own.