And then there’s secular Halloween—the costumes, the candy, the second most important shopping season of the year—only at Christmas do we spend more. The secular Halloween, when you think about it, is a very odd holiday, built on customs and traditions that people follow without any inkling of why they are doing what they’re doing, except that it’s fun. Truly if a committee had sat down to design the Most Fun Holiday Ever, they could hardly have done better than Halloween—let’s dress up, give away candy, have parties, pretend to be scary things that don’t really scare anybody.

Pagans and Witches know why we celebrate our Halloween—it connects us deeply to our ancestors, to our community, to our love for friends and relatives who have passed on, to our hopes for the future generations and to that great, creative life force we call Goddess.

Plus it’s fun.

Most of us also celebrate secular Halloween, Secular Halloween is one of the few things we do together as Americans that gets neighbors talking, fills the streets with laughter and sugar, lets us admire and feed each others’ children, and have fun together as a people. In my San Francisco neighborhood, the kids on the streets may be immigrants from Mexico or El Salvador or grandchildren of those who fled Vietnam. Secular Halloween is followed, a few days later, by Dia de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, when a huge procession of costumed skeletons dances through the streets, ending in a park filled with elaborate, candle-lit altars. That park has often been filled with drug dealers, it has seen murders, fights, and violence, but on that night it becomes a place of peaceful and joyful celebration, when people of all races and ethnic backgrounds come together to acknowledge death and celebrate life.

What’s scary about that?