While highlighting the findings of the Progress In International Reading Literacy Study in yesterday's Sunday Herald, Joanna Blythman perpetuates anxieties that have been with us since the dawn of the post-war consumer age; each generation striving to make the lives of the next more comfortable, yet fretting over what might result from denying their offspring "character building" hardships, bordering on hysteria over the effects of the mass-media on child literacy, behaviour and health. In the fifties it was rock and roll and comic-books that took the wrap; a decade later psychedelia, later still punk; then the eighties rash of "video nasties"; today it's the games console and internet that are cited as the root cause of the happy-slapper, the 21st century juvenile delinquent. As ever, artists prove easier targets than the family (that hallowed institution, the benign veneer of which masks a multitude of sins).

While it is undeniable that English and Welsh children have slid down the literacy league table in question and that this slide coincides with a boom in digital media, drawing a line directly from one to the other (i.e. baldly stating that children read less because of computer games.) is the same kind of flawed reasoning that once led to suggestions that peanut butter caused criminality. Besides, it overlooks the facts that video-games and the internet frequently refer children back to the book shelf (via adaptations of prose), make books more readily available than ever (via Amazon, eBooks et al), offer opportunities to forge friendships over mutual love of fiction (via forums and chatrooms) and that the networking culture growing online depends utterly on the ability to read and write. Simply put, without literacy, the internet dies.

No, children aren't reading for pleasure because they don’t see their parents doing it, perhaps don’t see them at all, and one can assume it’s not Mario Galaxy that’s distracting mum and dad. Positive enforcement at home will do far more than any initiative foisted upon our over-worked and under-paid teachers, and is the only credible riposte to the louder, brasher charms of the games culture. Thank goodness Iain Bell was on hand to remind readers that an examination of our children's state of being can deliver nothing other than a verdict on our record as parents, and that those who are complacent enough to leave their little ones glued to the screen “for more than three hours a day” are just as guilty of neglect as those who’d permit their child unlimited access to the sweetie cupboard, the drinks cabinet or the keys to the tool shed.

I grew up in the eighties, a time when the child-centric censor’s bête noire was animated cartoons based upon brands of merchandise (Masters of the Universe et al). My brothers and I were exposed to hours upon hours of such thinly-disguised blandishments. Yet none of us are obese, illiterate or socially dysfunctional, despite being as fond of pleasure, as partial to the instant gratification of chocolate, toys and Happy Meals, as the next youngster. How did we escape our media-besieged childhood with minds and bodies unharmed?

Simple: our parents spoke to us, and when they did so we heard the word “No” more often than “Yes”. Pester-power is a myth; children will not ask for things, plead for things, scream and kick for things unless past experience shows such behaviours yield results. My brothers and I knew that is was foolish to ask for sweets outside the weekend, for toys at any time other than a birthday or Christmas. Such entreaties had not, would not and never did work. As long as today’s parents maintain their laissez-faire attitude to spending and debt, running themselves ragged spinelessly acquiescing to the whims of their bloated children* they will continue to cite their “time-poor” lives as the cause of their malaise, dumping blame at the feet of those third parties who sought only to educate or entertain but were left to raise their children. What is needed is not a change in the way we present books to the young (whose inherent love of narrative can be cultured, with perseverance, into a fondness for reading), but a revolution in how our society supports and values the time invested in them by their parents. We need to pull our heads out of the sand and rethink maternity and paternity leave, working hours, rates of pay and recreation. The only way to curtail the spread of the coach-potato kid is to help them avoid a future as coach-potato parents, not waste precious time trying to push the exponentially expanding digital genie back into its bottle.

*However, if this article is true, I have to question Nintendo's tactics; why blast the developed world with wall-to-wall advertising for a (relatively) inexpensive product you can only crank out to the tune of "two million a month"? What's the point of fiegning abundance on a product you either can't or won't release in adequate numbers than even come close to meeting demand? Won't the second such year of apparently orchestrated shortages inevitably inculcate a resentment toward Nintendo in general and the Wii in particular? I don't know, may be I'm missing something.

There’s been a certain amount of anti-Hallowe’en sentiment in the UK media this year, and not just the usual confusion over whether it’s offensive to Christians because it’s bordeline Satanism, offensive to Pagans because the Christians moved All Saints’ and stole it, offensive to Muslims because they just don’t get it or offensive to those who like a party because it’s such a sorry shadow of the far more exciting Dia de la Muertos. This year I’ve detected a prevalent thread of “we never used to have Hallowe’en in my day” guff; this is the usual London-centric drivel. Scots have celebrated Hallowe’en in one form or another for centuries.

The real objection seems to be the perceived “commercialisation/Americanisation” of the holiday. Certainly there are non-celtic parts of the United Kingdom that didn’t make a big deal of the 31st of October until very recently, perhaps contenting themselves with lighting a candle or two and eating a wee Soul Cake. Scottish children, however, were always to be seen guising, carving turnips and dooking for apples. Clearly these customs have of late fallen prey to the inherently more colourful and appealing trick or treating, pumpkins and processed sugar (although Glaswegians have for several decades indulged their sweet-tooths with garish Hallowe’en cakes). Another occasion when Scots certainly didn’t used to make as large a hooplah as now was Christmas, preferring a minimal observance on that day and saving their festivities (i.e. drinking) for Hogmanay. If anything, ours has come to more closely resemble the English tradition than the American.

As any pub bore, Wikipedia editor or smart-alec cartoonist knows, Christmas is a complete mongrel, as disparate a recipe of cultural kitchen scraps, mythological suet and commercial sixpences as a brandy-bathed pudding. Bemoan the removal of Christ from Xmas if you will, the fact remains that Europeans have always, always, always gathered for feasts in the bleak midwinter, hauling evergreens into the hall and urging the spring to return. Whether you call it Christmas or not is incidental, and as little to do with the point of the thing as the 25th of December has to do with Jesus of Nazareth’s birthday.

The difference with Hallowe’en, I think, is that whatever way you look at it, its roots lie in something wholly spiritual, and that makes secular society faintly uncomfortable. The majority can see the appeal of at least one of Christmas' inherent yet not exclusively religious qualities (be it charity, family, consumerism or bingeing), but Hallowe’en is fundamentally about death and the afterlife. We buttoned-up Northern/Western Europeans have lost the knack of how to properly grieve and properly celebrate the departed. That’s why we write off the afore-mentioned Dia de la Meurtos as kitsch. In fact, our Latin cousins have got it right; the dead are no more inherently scary or malignant than our selves, so let’s throw them a party (I’ve said this before, but it’s a sentiment beautifully conveyed in Tim Burton’s The Corpse Bride). Meanwhile we try to distance ourselves from the root of the thing, make it less about actual, factual death and more about fictional monsters and ghouls.

Certainly it’s hard to swallow the aisles and aisles of dismembered rubber limbs, skull-shaped punch bowls, spider-strewn tablecloths and light-up, rain-proof plastic ghosts confronting one in the local Asda or Tescos. Hallowe’en, for all the changes that have befallen it, is still only one day. A few hours in fact. The expenditure of Christmas- as horrendous as that can become for those who can ill afford it- is rationalised by the fact that it is a matter of at least three days if not a week-and-a-half. But how does the modern parent deal with the child who wants their home turned into a cartoon spook house for the duration of one school-night?

Also, as the perception of children in this country turns increasingly toward demonising them, the prospect of being warmly received in the houses of strangers (or even on their doorsteps) becomes increasingly remote. Trick or treating/guising becomes looks set to become as infrequent in years to come as New Year’s “First Footing” has in the last two decades. Hallowe’en and all the other holidays like it become increasingly about organised, safe “fun”, preferably at home (tv specials, decorations, tat) or in regimented mass spectacles (inner-city fireworks displays in early November, celebrity Christmas light switching-ons, ticketed Hogmanay concerts in front of landmarks), than spontaneous merry-making. More and more opportunities to spend, spend, spend on hollow simulacra of actual cultural tradition, aided and abetted by the willing hacks at Hallmark (surely only a matter of time before they attempt to pump up April Fool’s Day into an annual celebration of crass japery, all over-sized comedy hats and plastic dog turds?). Only the ASBO-swathed hoodies of Lanark, Leeds, Limerick and Liverpool keep the torches of jolly anarchy burning with their heart-warming/fucking terrifying adherence to Mischief Night.

However loud the complaints of the anti-American cultural guardians, the truth is that popular fiction can only superficially modulate what’s already present and understood in the blood and bones of a country. Thanksgiving is as prevalent in American imagery as Hallowe’en and Christmas, yet no one in the UK will be seriously considering having the last Thursday in November off this year. Yes, we’ve taken to sooking on USA-striped candy-canes, but we pinched nutcrackers from the Germans before that, and wassail before that. Western movies and tv have done nothing to dent the popularity of Walpurgis or Golden Week elsewhere in the world. And the Americans have themselves proven you can’t foist a holiday onto people; look at the confusion and controversy surrounding Washington’s/Lincoln’s/Presidents’ Day and Kwanzaa.

It’s the politics of the moment, the insistence that we should be afraid of each other, that’s brought about the changes I’ve described above. Who knows? Perhaps the observance of holidays of every stamp is actually the route to positive multi-culturalism. Maybe our grandchildren, living in a Chinese-dominated economy and with mixed eastern-European parentage, will all be going crazy for super-flammable Ghost Festival money and Dyngus Day soakings? They certainly sound more interesting than the kind of dull, forced larks lampooned here.