All Hallows Eve

When I was younger, there were a few people we knew who thought Halloween was a Satanic holiday.  While their passion against the celebration caused some consternation among adults, most of us kids just thought they needed to have more of a sense of humor and stop trying to bum out our candy collection.
There is no denying that Halloween has it's roots in the ancient pagan harvest festivals.  Pagans would wear costumes to allow the spirits of the dead to roam freely for the evening, and thus appease any restless spirits or random deities so that they would not interfere with this most crucial time, as they gathered in the produce of their labor against the hardships of a long winter.
When Christianity encountered these traditions, rather than shrilly denouncing them and crying out about the devil, they in fact did something that the church has been quite good at over the centuries: they went with the flow.  See, despite the reputation that relatively rare crusades and witch hunts have given the Christian faith, we're actually much more successful at syncretism than we are at driving out the pagan gods.
It all comes down to the rather basic realization that all the gods that Christianity has faced as it expanded over the last two thousand years, are not real.  If we treat them as real, we are jousting at windmills.  In Gaelic culture, the church transmuted Samhain, into All Hallows Eve and All Saints Day, in Mesoamerica they took the Dia de los Muertos, the day of the dead and turned it into a preparatory celebration for Dia de todos los Santos. 
Of course, these celebrations held on to much of the pagan revelry.  That's why you have to love pagans, they really know how to party. You just have to watch out when they come for you with a knife, because a ritual sacrifice usually plays into it sooner or later.  These celebrations hit a theme: honoring the passing of time, in terms of the "death" of the natural world as winter sets in (at least in the northern hemisphere), in terms of honoring our ancestors and bringing the community together to unwind after a long agricultural season and before the vicissitudes of winter set in.
I like to look at these as rather pleasing translations of the human experience into religious observances.  Even long after Halloween has become a completely irreligious observance for most (which is another reason to just calm the heck down), there is still that chance to reflect on the blessings of year and the passage of seasons, if you want to.  And, I think, you should want to.
As far as the Saints go, I find that, for me at least, enough time has passed since the whole reformation thing, that I can begin to appreciate the Saints and what they add to our collective Christian faith.  They have so many cool stories to tell, and they give us a chance to get our feet on the ground in the history of the church.  Santiago, St. James, has become rather important to me over the past years and as I look forward to my second pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela at winter's end, I can't help but think that maybe we Protestants threw the baby out with the bath water in many regards.
Excluding and anathematizing, while it is sometimes necessary, is not when the Disciples of Jesus are really at their best.  It's not when we are following him most closely.  When we take the loaves and fishes (metaphorically speaking) and turn them into a celebration and a feast, that's when we're getting warmer.
That is what makes me happy about seeing all those children dressed up in scary costumes on their mercenary quest for sweet treats, it reminds me that God is so very good at taking what we give him, tricks or treats, and making it all very good indeed.  It reminds me that our faith has been at it's best when we open ourselves to the many and varied forms of what it means to be human, translated and connected them with the life of Christ and the message of the Gospel.