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If this is your first autumn in Britain, you may have noticed the shops filling up with plastic skeletons, fake spiders and enormous orange pumpkins since about the middle of September. Halloween is on 31 October, and although many British people will tell you it is ‘too American’, a lot of them celebrate it anyway.

The festival is actually much older than the American version. It goes back to Samhain (pronounced ‘sow-in’), a Celtic festival marking the end of the harvest, when people believed the line between the living and the dead was thin. In Scotland and Ireland, children went ‘guising’ (= dressing up in disguise) and carved lanterns out of turnips, long before anyone thought of using pumpkins. I have seen a carved turnip, and believe me, it is far scarier than any pumpkin.

So what actually happens today? In the evening, children dress up as witches, ghosts, vampires or their favourite film characters and go from house to house ‘trick or treating’. They knock, say ‘Trick or treat!’, and you give them sweets (in theory, the trick is what happens if you don’t, but most children are far too busy collecting chocolate to bother).

Here is the unwritten rule that nobody explains. You don’t have to take part, and many people don’t. The signal is the pumpkin. A lit pumpkin on the doorstep or in the window means ‘yes, knock here, we have sweets’. No pumpkin and the lights off means ‘please don’t’. Most families stick to houses with a pumpkin, so if you don’t want visitors, simply don’t put one out. And if you do want to join in, buy a big bag of sweets before the evening, because the shops can run out.

Adults celebrate too, usually at fancy dress parties (fancy dress = costumes, not elegant clothes, which confuses a lot of my students). If a British friend invites you to a Halloween party and says ‘fancy dress’, they mean you should come dressed as something spooky.

A few words you will hear this week: spooky (= a bit scary, in a fun way), costume, trick or treat, carve a pumpkin, and ‘Happy Halloween!’, which is the normal greeting on the day.

And then, five days later, everything changes again, because on 5 November the sky fills with fireworks for Bonfire Night. But that is a story for another post.

There are lots of little customs like this that nobody explains to international students. I collected twenty of them in my free guide, The Unwritten Rules. Get your copy here.