All great feasts had vigils the night before. Sure there were pagan practices associated with this date/time of year. That's exactly why a Christian holiday was substituted. This was a tried and true method of evangelization, pioneered by Gregory the Wonderworker in what is now Turkey (Asia Minor) in the 200s, producing the first majority Christian culture precisely because he deliberately plopped Christian festivals on pagan holidays.
Christmas was just the opposite. It appears that the Emperor Aurelia invented the Festival of the Unconquered Sun" and plopped it on the winter solstice to compete with the growing Christian "menace"--more and more Christians of more and more upstanding status in society were threatening the hold of the old Roman gods on the culture.
As long as the culture was majority Christian, harmless pranks, soaping windows, trick-or-treating etc. practiced by Christians who clearly knew the difference between occult practices and the Truth, could be tolerated. Real pagan survivals did exist and if you read the letters of Christian bishops and missionaries and the canon laws in the conversion stages of western and northern Europe you see them trying to stamp out these pagan survivals, which largely succeeded by ca. 1100 or 1200 in most (not all) places.
Now that our culture is paganized and people openly and genuinely pursue the occult and black magic and gory and macabre (even CSI tv programs dwell on the macabre, which is a mark of a repaganizing culture--sex alone is not enough to sell the product, one has to go for more and more gore, more and more Death, a byproduct of abortion for 35 years), some of the practices surrounding Halloween do need to be reassessed. But instead of falsely claiming it is a pagan festival, Christians should reclaim it as the Eve of All Saints, celebrate saints lives etc. in programs for kids, avoid the slutty, macabre aspects. But trick-or-treating can be done without any of that objectionable stuff and if done that way, has nothing whatsoever to do with paganism. It's a social custom, one of many such customs of going door to door to one's neighbors either bringing gifts or receiving gifts. Our much bigger problem is the destruction of neighborhoods and neighborliness.
The foolish Christians who simply write Halloween off as totally pagan are uninformed and have a cure worse than the disease. They should put their energy instead into finding ways to restore neighborliness, learn to celebrate their Christian brothers and sisters in heaven, especially the great heroes of the faith, and make the night and the next day memorable for kids. Holidays are crucial to culture. You have to work at keeping them Christian but if you do, it creates a Christian world for the next generation.
It may have to be done largely with parties for Christian kids within the Church community since our culture is rapidly becoming pagan. But one could do that and still take the kids trick-or-treating to whatever degree it can be done safely and memorably wherever one lives.
Anyone who simply says it's a pagan holiday doesn't know what he's talking about. It can be celebrated devilishly in worship of Death and the netherworld or it can be celebrated Christianly, just like just about everything else.
Take back the night, we who know the True Daystar.
Wow, the voice of reason. Excellent post.