In our street we had a fair few children and each year they would dress up and head up and down the street with their parents trick or treating.

I would occasionally trick them into eating a slice of orange before handing out the sweets but I went along with their enjoyment of it and the efforts they made with their costumes. I have one pumpkin which I light – that is it and it comes out every year.

Increasingly though this has become – like Xmas – a huge commercial operation with houses vying for each other as to who has the most ghoulish entrance. Plastic skeletons, buckets for sweets, and hundreds of rheems of that horrible fake spider webs deck doors and gates. Cant be good for birds or even small insects and animals.Hubby abhors it and I am not a fan but our habits seem to grow worse and not better. Do we or even the children need all of that fake and silly decoration ? Of course not, and it just gets binned like all the throwaways at Xmas.

Let’s do away with all of this – but if we still want to celebrate this strange pagan festival ( the children don’t have a clue what it is about anyway ) why not use our creative energy to make wonderful costumes out of old sheets or do something effective yet totally recyclable like my neighbour here. Top marks to this one.