'About a month before Halloween, she puts up her Halloween decorations. These are not taken down until its time to decorate the house for Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving decorations then remain up until its time to decorate for Christmas.'

I'm told that, in the States, Halloween is nearly as important to the retail industry as Christmas.

I can easily believe it - when we arrived here in July, there were already Halloween decorations in the shops - of course, they had to get in there early, because for the last month or so the Halloween stuff has had to share retail floor space with the Christmas stuff.

Had we wanted to, we could have decorated our whole apartment in a pumpkin theme (complete with dinner service, kitchen utensils, table lamps and bath towels), dressed ourselves wholly in orange and black, and collected enough free candy (sorry - sweets) to last for the whole of the year to come.

Not surprisingly then, it's the shopping malls where Halloween is celebrated most religiously. The shops give away free candy, and children turn up in hordes, in their cute little costumes (help, I seem to be turning native!) to be shown off by their parents and to see and be seen.

No child is too young to escape the compulsory dressing up. I go to a pregnancy and parenthood support group at our church - and this year the weekly meeting fell on the day itself, so we decided to hold a Halloween party. Every baby and toddler came in costume - from "Bob the Builder" to a Viking princess.

Even the foetus is not immune to suggestions. I read a pregnancy magazine which had the following suggestion for a costume for the "mom-to-be" - you wear something that bares your stomach, and paint it with orange face paints and black stripes to represent a pumpkin.

Oddly enough, I didn't feel it was necessary to go quite that far to assimilate myself and my unborn child into the American culture!

Friends told us that the best place in LA to go to see Halloween decorations is North Hollywood (more a home to the film and television industry than Hollywood itself, these days - Hollywood proper seems more devoted to the porn industry).

There, entertainment industry employees spend small fortunes and large amounts of effort in decorating their homes and gardens. We didn't go, but even around here in Pasadena there are some sights to be seen.

I frequently drive through an affluent area past an almost passable half-timbered mock Tudor mansion, which over the last few days has sprouted a complete polystyrene graveyard on its front lawn.

Its an odd mixture, this combination of saccharine gothic creepiness and horrifying commercialism, and clearly deep rooted. Not once have I heard either a criticism of the commercialism, nor any hint of the distress felt by evangelical Christians concerning the occult aspects of Halloween that one so often finds in the UK.

It's as if the celebration of Halloween is an inalienable right, even more unquestionable than the right to bear arms, or the right to dictate another country's political structure.

I enjoyed my first Halloween in the US, but I was left with a few doubts and questions. Despite the fact that any hint of occultism is rendered anodyne by a thick overlay of self-conscious cuteness, the festival does deal with some of the blackest aspects of human nature -and I don't just mean rampant commercialism, but also the stimulation of fear, and the persecution of the vulnerable.

But then I reconsidered. Because, when you think about it, them theme of almost every horror movie and gothic novel is that it is possible to face and overcome the things that go bump in the night, and that good and right will triumph over our demons eventually.

So perhaps this is the reason why this festival is so popular here - it provides a hope that those things we fear are not so dreadful after all, that we can, and will, overcome them.