To be sick of how "big" a thing Halloween is now?

[BlancheBlue]

When I was little which wasn't SO long ago, Halloween was a bit of apple bobbing and a few teenagers with coats pulled over their head asking for change and some egg throwing. Supermarkets were stuffed with tacky shite and Halloween wasn't seen as a massive night out for people to get pissed and having a Halloween party was quite rare.

This interpretation of Halloween is a pure American import. Whats next ffs UK thanksgiving or something.

prepared buckets of water for trick or treaters

Blanche, I'm with you.

Tiger it has to be Trump.
(Please God, let it not be Trump.)

"I prefer Guy Fawkes night on 5th November. At least that is part of our history."

Yes, nothing like a celebration of national bigotry against Catholics...

However, there may be a point here about the perception of Halloween as an inappropriately 'Catholic' festival in the C16 and C17 - and the celebration of Guy Fawkes as a more 'Protestant' alternative. (I'm not enough of a historian of those centuries to know how accurate this is).

Whether or not we buy the idea that the festival is a Christianization of a Pagan tradition, it indubitably existed as a day in Europe far before it was celebrated in the USA (though, of course, the celebrations change with the era)!! The jack-o-lantern, for example, was an Irish folkloric thing far before it was an American thing.

Except how someone offering you a sweet is begging I don't know

Going round knocking on doors and asking for sweets, perchance? Otherwise construed as begging. Knocking on stranger's doors and asking for sweets (not a good idea at any other time of year but magically OK on Halloween...
Anyway, you can tell I think it's all a load of crap as well. OP, YADNBU.

I'm nearly 50 and Halloween as a big thing when I was growing up my poor mother used to carve turnips

sleeping "D" all of the above?

The smell of a burning swede set alight by a wobbly piece of household candle will stay with me forever

Haha, me to! Thankfully, for the sake of my fingers, pumpkins have replaced turnips!