Tonight’s the last chance to enjoy Halloween, so make sure your children make the most of it.

In an age where child abduction stories can whip round the world and back again in a matter of hours, haunting us with those missing pictures, we’ve become paranoid that a stranger might steal our precious children.

In actual fact, there’s little evidence to suggest that this is any more likely now than it was in the 1970s, when we all ran around in the fields without a mobile phone attaching us to our parents like a hi-tech umbilical cord. Still, parents can be a little reluctant to let the apple of their eye into the wide world once darkness falls to knock on the doors of strangers and yell trick or treat at Halloween, just in case the trick ends up being a vanishing child.

But there is still a way to capture the magic of this British and American tradition without feeling like the world’s most negligent parent; you can organise a party to ‘trick or treat the street’. This is becoming increasingly popular where I live in the US, with people now converging for miles around on the best street, to check out the decorations and knock safely on the doors.

In our neighbourhood, as night falls, everyone heads down to ‘Halloween Street’ in costume. The very first house on the block sets the mood by playing spooky music interspersed with thriller-style announcements about the fate of the passing children (usually age appropriate… ‘don’t let your parents check the back seat when you get into the car…. You know what’s there’). My kids are generally too scared to knock on that door, but the friendly man next door can tempt them up the drive by shaking his cauldron of chocolates, even though he is ghoulishly illuminated with green and orange lights.

Just the right amount of fear factor and no real menace

After their first score of sweets, they are galvanised into action and our shambling progress up the street gets faster. The residents really go to town on the decorations. Last year there was a haunted disco display, various gigantic ghosts billowing in the breeze and a heavy helping of witches’ lairs and creepy caverns. Most people set up a table outside but it’s fun to ring the doorbells on the closed doors and see whether a witch’s cat or a skeleton will answer. Some ask for a song or a rhyme in exchange for the treats and others hand out pencils and toys instead of chocolates.

Things come to a dramatic halt outside the haunted house. These brave homeowners turn their garage and half of the back garden into a maze.

Part of the fun is spotting people you know in costume; having your dentist towering over you in a vampire costume with bloody fangs he made himself out of denture moulds can be disconcerting, especially when he melts back into the crowd with a flash of his cape and his children bear their mini fangs at you instead.

To get started, you drop a flyer into everyone’s letter box inviting them to be part of a Halloween Extravaganza and telling them that if they want to participate, they need some spooky decorations for the house and a pumpkin full of treats or tricks.

Anyone that doesn’t want to get involved can leave their house undecorated (and ideally, go out, unless they want their doorbell rung a hundred times by hopeful sweet seekers).