Don't B.S. me. You're denying the obvious. The glorifying of witches, demons, and the macbre which is the reality of the celebration of Halloween in the United States, along with it's association with such things as slasher movies, communicates absolutely nothing about virtuous deeds of saints. I'm not surprised by the existence of Roman Catholic propaganda seeking to justify it. The history of Roman Catholicism has included syncretism from the beginning. Statues of Roman idols were converted to idols of Mary and Joseph and various Apostles and Martyrs. It doesn't surprise me that Irish Catholics would practice syncretism with the pagan practices that previously existed in Ireland.
Discussion
I think those who seek to use Halloween to glorify evil are co-opting a Christian holiday to try to justify some sort of neo-paganism. Evil cannot create, it can only corrupt. Halloween only makes sense in the light of All Hallows' the day after, but our commercialized vision of the day eliminates all of that entirely.
The main point I want to get across is that it's quite all right for Christian parents to send their kids out trick-or-treating, so long as the festivities are kept in their proper context of All Saints' and All Souls' Days. If you don't want to celebrate Halloween, that's quite alright, but there's no need to cede the vigil of one of the high feast days of the year to neo-paganism just because our consumer culture focuses on the wrong parts.
On a slightly different note, the common depictions of the devil with red skin, a pointy tail, and a pitchfork are intended to mock him. Such costumes were used in Medieval passion plays, and the imagery even appears in some quite humorous passages of Dante's Inferno. I suspect this tradition is another contributor to Halloween customs.
https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/satan-proud-and-powerful
Halloween is not catholic stuff. In Brazil as a child, I did not even know it existed. It has nothing to do with All Saints' day.
Only as a teenager reading Peanuts I learned from Charlie Brown that in USA there was some kind of witch-festival with candies.
HW is anglo-german stuff. "Witch culture" is stronger on protestant lands, because superstitions and accusations could grown into mass histeria (Salem, etc). I remember being amazed how americans could be so primitive as to be witch-hunting in the 1690's. If some woman were accused of witchcraft in catholic lands the church would investigate with strong cepticism, and calumny was a grave crime everywhere.
witches flying in brooms were not in our imagination until we got american cartoons, much less salem-level stuff.
That said... we repeat the pagan god's names when we name weekdays. We learn mithology, read Homer, docs use esculapius rod, etc.
if nobody takes the witch-pagan stuff seriously... why HW would be different? We lose so much time idolizing sportsmen or Batman, why not witches or ghosts?
'wrong' is when real satanists exploit it to their ends.
or when HW occupies so much mental time that people forget All Saints Day, or All Souls Day.
But halloween is not the only secular feast pushing religious ones out of our minds, every decade there is another woke-festival worse that the previous one.
Just because something is not associated with Roman Catholicism in some part of the globe does not mean it's not associated with Roman Catholicism in another part of the globe. Syncretism usually accommodates the local variety of paganism. In Ireland that would be druids.
I don't see why adopting local cultural forms is such a bad thing. When peoples join the universal Church, they bring their culture with them. Historically, this often added a local flavor to preexisting Catholic feasts
Local culture can contaminate. I prefer the pure to the profane. Separation and purity are integral to the concepts of holiness, sanctification, and sainthood.
The New Testament was written in a specific time and place in history, namely, amidst a Jewish and pagan milieu in a corner of the Roman Empire. The writers were influenced by the cultural practice of their time, and Scripture itself is full of cultural references that don't apply directly to the present day.
Tell me where you are finding the pure, unadulterated cultural practice of Christianity.
Halloween is not associated with Catholics. Its modern form started in protestant US.
And the whole 'witch folklore' would be forgotten in catholic lands if not from protestantism - witch-hunt histerics flourished in anglo-german protestant lands and kept the associated folcklore alive.
Even the date is wrong, it would make more sense in the catholic calendar to associate it with Nov2 (The day of the dead in purgatory, like in mexico), than with Nov 1st, the day of all saints in heaven.
Here in Brazil, it is only big with protestants (like luterans/calvinists, not like pentecostals) who pushed for it, helped by american media/movies/etc. Today more schools do HW trick-or-treat (children like candies), but it is quite recent. Secular/woke/commies see it as another woke-festival.