Whatever happened to traditional Halloween trick-or-treating?
By traditional, I mean kids walking to houses in their neighborhoods, getting candy and in return amusing the people handing out the treats with their costumes.
In most cases, the kids knew the adults distributing the candy, and vice-versa.
Fast-forward to 2001, earlier tonight, traditional Halloween. The wife and I went to my son’s neighborhood, about a mile and a half from our home, to make the rounds with his family, which includes two young daughters.
We still were traditional, doing a quick circuit of the neighborhood on foot and calling it quits after less than an hour because a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old tire relatively quickly.
But we were out of step, figuratively and literally. Begin with the blitzkrieg tactics employed by many. Vehicles pulled up and disgorged groups of kids, who hustled to every house with the porch light on, the universal signal in these parts that there is candy to be hand.
Sometimes the transportation waited at the dropoff point. Other times, the vehicles went up and down the streets, creating unnecessary traffic with so many young children about.
I’m relatively familiar with my son’s neighborhood and I can say with some degree of certainty that a huge number of the costumed kids (some had to be teenagers, or beyond) were from parts unknown.
The mistake made by my son’s municipality, and by mine, was to have their trick-or-treat night on an island, not coordinated to share the same date with other area trick-or-treat days, so as to discourage the people who would turn this kid’s celebration into the candy equivalent of the cheese giveaways that used to attract all the area’s loose cannons.
As a child, I can never recall trick-or-treating at a house I couldn’t easily have walked to and back from.
Were I a betting man – and I am – I’d lay good odds that most of the people who were being ferried about in vehicles had crossed several municipality borders to reach this destination tonight.
One candy-grabbing vehicle had a relatively loud exhaust. I swear, when I had gotten back home with still some time left in the two-hour trick-or-treat window, I heard the same vehicle prowling our street.
I didn’t want to look to confirm it, and be forced to contemplate what sort of person turns trick-or-treat into an exercise in greed and exploitation of the generous among the population.
I saw joy on the faces of some of the kids accepting candy tonight. I saw similar happiness on the faces of many distributing the treats.
How unfortunate that this traditional children’s rite of celebration is being corrupted by greedy adults who are doing their best to indoctrinate greed in the kids they drive from area to area trying to score more candy.
Sam Ross Jr's site 