Laura-lady has some interesting comments on Halloween:
I suspect that the commercial success of the holiday has very little to do with the neo-pagan emergence. Yes, we are becoming more superstitious as a society but that is really just a reaction to the atheistic tendencies of the past few decades. We are on a eternal flux between materialism and superstition and the pendulum is just swinging back the other way. This is hardly the first time that a vast number of people have been interested in the more silly and harmless looking aspects of the occult.
No, I think that the popularity of Halloween has to do with something entirely different. It has to do with the Culture of Death. Because one of the curious aspects of the Culture of Death is that it makes Death a forbidden subject …We ignore the mortality of others so that we can ignore our own….