The Book of Hallowe'en is a light treatment, but it was sort of a landmark in trying to be careful with the history.

If you are interested in the development of holiday traditions, Halloween in North America is a really interesting case because it went through drastic evolution from about the 1860s through 1970s -- harvest festival, cute children's parties, violent youth mobs, highly monitored parties, commercialization, adult-oriented horror.

If you want to read in detail, I'd start with Lisa Morton's books, Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween (2019) and The Halloween Encyclopedia 2e (2011).

From the book's preface:

This book is intended to give the reader an account of the origin and history of Hallowe'en, how it absorbed some customs belonging to other days in the year,— such as May Day, Midsummer, and Christmas.

The context is illustrated by selections from ancient and modern poetry and prose, related to Hallowe'en ideas.

> "How many times the Church has decanted the new wine of Christianity into the old bottles of heathendom."

Maybe I'm not good at metaphor, but I feel like this should be the other way round:

"How many times the Church has decanted the old wine of heathendom into the new bottles of Christianity."

Old cloaking itself as new.

As a heathen, this is bordering on offensive.

The difference is intent. This isn't paganism hiding in Christianity. This is intentional organized decisions to convert pagan holidays to Christian ones. It is a radically successful attempt to eradicate them not "the old hiding in the new".

Christmas stands out even more as an example of it, literally the time of the celebration was chosen by committee to displace winter solstice holidays.

Plenty of religions have solstice holidays and and harvest celebrations, and likely other older religions did the same, but Christianity is the only one in living memory that actively subverts and attempts to consume the holidays of native populations they wish to convert.

The selfish gene by Richard Dawkins made me realize why the most popular religions are how they are.

To prevail against other similar beliefs, traits like intolerance for other gods, fear mongering with things like hell, etc, increase the chances of survival.

I would have said it the way you did: Christians took pagan traditions, put a Christian veneer on them, and then acted like they had something new. I think the original quote was trying to portray something different: that Christians tried to breathe “new life” into pagan holidays.

But I think your way of phrasing it matches history better. The Christians were trying to disguise the pagan sources for their holiday. Since the bottle or wineskin is in plain view and the wine inside is hidden, I personally would have compared the Christian veneer to the bottle and the pagan history to the wine inside it.