The Church-owned Deseret News published an article this week calling on people to “turn on your porch light and go door to door.” The article starts by pointing out how few of us know our neighbors, and how loneliness is growing. Halloween is “a rehearsal for citizenship: an exercise in courage, respect and confidence in the goodwill of others.”
I like that phrase that trick-or-treating is an exercise of confidence in the goodwill of others. My own trick-or-treat years (late 70s to early 80s) were marred by a scare about razor blades in candy, with hospitals offering to x-ray candy to make sure it was safe. Does anyone know anyone personally who got sabotaged candy? I never heard of it happening other than in news articles that made adults shake their heads about the state of the world 40+ years ago. My trick-or-treat years were the last years that people handed out homemade treats like popcorn balls in plastic wrap, or caramel apples. Maybe homemade treats are a nostalgia thing for some people, but I traded any popcorn balls or caramel apples for the good stuff — mini chocolate bars or Smarties.
I’ve lived in five different neighborhoods since reaching adulthood, and the one I’m in currently has the fewest trick-or-treaters. We’ve got kids in the neighborhood; it’s just my house is on the side of the street without a sidewalk and there are no houses across the street. Trick-or-treaters know how to gauge effort for candy and my house is more effort than the candy is worth. I get around this by handing out entire handfuls of candy to the couple dozen kids who make it to my porch.
I have no limits on who I will give candy to. Teenagers without costumes? Sure! Adults who are carrying a tired toddler? Have an extra! Hispanic kids? Here you go! (That last one is because a woman in my exercise class this morning said something disparaging about all the Hispanic kids she saw on Halloween because she doesn’t believe they live in her neighborhood. I was appalled. Besides the fact that it is a sacred right of childhood to trick-or-treat in any neighborhood in search of the best candy, don’t be racist on Halloween, you bigoted jerk.)
Here’s a cute Halloween costume story when my son dressed up to go to school last year. He went as a character from a video game, Crazy Dave. Crazy Dave looks like this:
Off he went to high school with a beard, jeans, and a pot on his head. When he got home, he burst through the front door and hollered, “Mom! Who’s Johnny Appleseed?” Apparently every teacher thought he was Johnny Appleseed, while all the students immediately clocked him as Crazy Dave. The generational divide!
What are your thoughts on Halloween?
Do you get trick-or-treaters?
Do you do Halloween parties?
Do you turn off your porch light and hide in your house?
Do you dress up?
Do your kids/grandkids dress up?
Do you think Halloween is a community activity?
Want to gripe about or praise trunk-or-treat?
And the most important question of all — what do you do when Halloween is on a Sunday?
Wheat & Tares 
I think Halloween is a great community activity.
Where I live now, there are zero children in my neighborhood. I visit my sister and go trick-or-treating with their grand-daughter. So my porch light is out and my house is empty, but that doesn’t mean I’m anti-social!
I went to my ward’s and my niece’s ward’s truck-or-treat.
We’re on a dead end with few children, likely won’t see anyone, they’re all downtown. Plus the ward is having the trunk ‘or’ treat tonight as well, what the heck?
Halloween is a false a commercial festival that should be ignored. It is not a community builder. It is a community destroyer.
For what has the modern Halloween become? It has largely become an excuse for drunkenness. Men and women sit around either at honky tonks or in homes, drinking horrifically excessive amounts of orange tinted German Beer. They are completely plastered long before midnight.
And what of the costumes? The costumes these days barely cover anything, with the primary goal being to look like a scantily clad Russian princess.
What the drunkenness and debauchery bring is no treat. It is an epidemic of broken homes. The kids get a few extra Kit Kats, but they give up a happy home in return.
We are in an area with retired people who hand out candy, and renters who don’t, and a few children who probably find a more upscale neighborhood because the thinking goes, small houses = small treats. We have not had many trick or treaters here, but the retired people hand out handfuls, so it should be a pretty good haul. More young families have moved in recently, as my retired friends die or go to a rest home, so perhaps trick or treating will improve. My sister in law lives in a much more upscale neighborhood (overlooking the Virgin River, right where the paraglider went down last night.) and she reports 50-100 kids each year, just a constant stream where you don’t even close your door between.
I don’t like trunk or treat. Too much candy too fast. Why not take your kids to the grocery store for a bagful of their favorite. Besides, trunk or treats have always been on not quite Halloween, so the kids just go trick or treat the next night anyway. So, the kids end up with double the candy and the candy suppliers have to buy a big supply for the ward trunk or treat and whatever they pass out for traditional trick or treat. The one year we had children still at home and did both, my kids ended up with a two year supply of junk. No kidding, the chocolate even went funny because by Easter it is stale. After that, I swore off and gave my children their choice and we didn’t participate in the other. They always chose traditional trick or treat.
We always trick or treated on Sunday because most of the years our children were small we lived outside the Jello belt and all the other children did trick or treat Sunday or not. The most fun my children had was living in Military housing in Germany where one high rise was American and the other was British. This will date us, but they went with friends as Hans, Luke, Leah, C3PO, two Ewoks, towing a canister vacuum that looked just like R2D2. The Brits prepared by getting a couple of rolls of American pennies or nickels and passed out coins, apparently guessing which coins were appropriate per child, because my children came home with British and German coins as well as American. And when they tried to go to the German high rise across the street, the Germans were confused about it all. (Germans don’t trick or treat in any form) so, it was a good lesson in the different cultures. They took all coins to the bakery across the street where the store accepted whatever coins the children had for the kind of Kinder Egg with the toy inside that are illegal in the US (stupid country that thinks the toy is a choking hazard.) Back then the German Mark was worth about 25 cents and a Kinder Egg was 1 Mark, and each child ended up with 12-15 eggs. I still have Kinder Egg toys 40 years later.
I love Halloween. It’s a true community holiday and more “Christian” than Christmas in many ways. There is no other holiday that combines the spirit community and the spirit of giving (bad pun intended) quite like Halloween. My kids will not be trick or treating tonight, but I plan on leaving the light on late and answering the door. (The only exception is, any kid wearing an ICE costume will only get one piece of candy)
I as well have no problem with teenagers trick or treating. There are certainly worse things they could be doing, like using a fake ID to get into one of JCS’s honkey tonks and guzzle copious amounts of alcohol.
My ward has had trunk-or-treat in the ward house parking lot for a long time. I expressed my dissatisfaction with it, saying it was anti-neighborly. The last two years we have moved the trunk-or-treat to the nearby elementary school and invited all, which is much better. Although still somewhat insular.
We had 131 trick or treaters last year. (Good data helps you prepare for the future.) We live a few blocks from homes that will get thousands of kids. We’re having some friends over who don’t have kids and live in a basement apartment that would never get trick-or-treaters, so they enjoy helping us pass out candy. For a number of years I was the parent who went out with the kids while my wife stayed home to answer the door. Our youngest is easily old enough to go with friends and our oldest is finally done with trick-or-treating but is having some friends over to watch movies in our basement. I have no problem with handing out candy to high school kids provided they have some sort of costume and have decent manners to both us and younger kids that are out.
One or two years ago, a group of high school students stopped at our door. One or two I knew reasonably well, one or two I knew who they were, and a couple I had never met before. In typical teenager fashion some of them weren’t dressed nearly warmly enough; costumes were clearly more important than common sense. Looking at their poor planning we did the only sensible thing, which was to invite them in to warm up for a minute and start making some hot chocolate. I tried to make small talk with the kids that had just walked into a strangers house based on just one or two of their friends being comfortable with us. I asked one kid their name and watched as there was a full two or three seconds where they considered the question before responding. The name he gave us clearly didn’t match his physical build, and almost certainly wasn’t his legal name, or likely what he was called at school or at home. I repeated his name, welcomed him to our home and asked him the only important question of the night: “What kind of hot chocolate would you like?” The shift in his body language was instant and dramatic; I could see anxiety release from his whole body. I’ve never seen him again, but I’m glad that for that night he trusted us enough to be himself. It breaks my heart that so many kids carry that much anxiety with them every day as they go through the world.
And now I’d better go make sure I have the hot chocolate ready for tonight, just incase.
My younger kids are still quite young, so my wife and I escort them around the neighborhood. I couldn’t care less about costumes or the traditional “spooky” trappings of Halloween, but we have come to enjoy the opportunity to briefly visit with our neighbors at their doorsteps, if only this one night a year. Some of our elderly neighbors are quite lonely, but they really enjoy getting to see the kids in costume, and getting to chat briefly with us, and my kids have discovered they tend to be the most generous with candy, so they are usually our first stops. Additionally, the kids get a chance to practice using good manners (“please” and “thank you”) with unfamiliar adults in a relatively safe environment. At least one of our neighbors, in addition to having candy for kids, also hands out miniature liquor bottles to the adults that accompany them. Though we politely decline, we understand it comes from a place of kindness and understanding, as if to say “we feel your pain, let’s help each other get through this” which we appreciate. And taking my kids out is the best way to avoid having to sit at home and repeatedly answer the door to hand out the candy, which I dislike.
When I was growing up (1980s, not Utah) there was some residual panic about candy being laced with razor blades or drugs or poison or whatever (though not one confirmed case of such) so for several years my parents only let me trick-or-treat at houses of families we knew, such as ward members. This was logistically challenging because my ward was spread out, so my mom actually drove us between houses, which I would now consider to be a waste of time and fuel. But she was very much of the mindset that out in the evil secular world, only fellow Mormons could be trusted. Eventually she got over this, and we just went through our block like normal kids did. Even so, we still had to turn in our candy haul at the end of the night to our parents to be “inspected”. Years later, as a parent myself, I discovered “candy inspection” was a perfect ruse to comb through and pick out my favorite candy bars and keep them for myself, because I’m certain that’s what my parents did. You know, for safety reasons.
Our ward had a trunk-or-treat a few days ago, but it was kind of just an added on segment to the ward fall festival/chili cookoff, and lasted no more than 20 minutes before all the participating families ran out of candy. As far as the kids are concerned, its not a suitable replacement for the main event on the 31st, and I could take it or leave it.
When Halloween falls on a Sunday, I have no problem letting my kids enjoy it on that night (again, I don’t live in Utah). But the night before we sometimes get one or two ward member kids knocking at our door, at the behest of their TBM parents, and we scrambled to find some candy to give them.
I LOVED Halloween as a kid in the late 50s/early 60s. It was real life Charlie Brown experience where adults were the out-of-focus hands that passed out candy and the world was made up of kids. We roamed the widest circle of our neighborhood not stopping until “isn’t it a little late” became the constant response.
Nothing but Christmas could match the exhilaration!
I was always a skeptic about the bogeyman of tampered treats. Still, I made sure everything was individually wrapped so kids could actually have them. Gone were the colorful holiday themed bags with handfuls of Halloween goodies and the pumpkins made of orange crepe paper with a little bit of goodness at their core. Gone was the freedom to roam the streets unescorted. I hope the fun for the kids wasn’t gone but I missed the freedom. I guess that explains why I’ve always thought trunk or treat was sanitized into total robotic boredom. But my granddaughter does it at pre-school and she thinks it’s great. So who’s to say…
My neighborhood now is the one everyone wants to Trick or Treat in. Kids who are bussed to the local elementary school tell their parents they need to go to the neighborhood with all the decorations. And they’re rewarded with treats they might not get in their own neighborhoods. They come in caravans. Being LA that means a lot of Hispanic Trick or Treaters who are not locals. So what? Fun is fun and smart is smart. And why wouldn’t they go where the treats are best? So local or not the “kids” get Halloween goodies (non-candy at my house) which are appropriate to their age group. And my husband and I get to enjoy their costumes and the joy of spreading joy. I’m all for all of it!
After being robbed while passing out Halloween candy a few years ago, hard pass for me. Our stake had over 1000 trunk or treaters, so that should be a great place for kids to go.
A lot of my neighborhood sit out in their driveways with a fire pit and chat with parents and kids. In our part of Missouri trick or treaters are expected to have a joke to share. Some kids sing a song. Afterwards my kids watch scary movies with their friends.
It’s a good time.
Halloween is now over for us. The inflatables are deflated. The lights are out. The evening is a memory.
We sat outside to greet our Trick or Treaters.
They were mostly middle schoolers possibly getting to Trick or Treat alone at last. And we had high schoolers too. Not so many elementary school kids but a handful of toddlers being encouraged by mommy and daddy to get out the line they had rehearsed for days I suppose. The older kids definitely had the funniest and most thoughtful costumes.
All of them were joyful. All of them were well behaved and pleased to get a slap bracelet or some day glow colored slime or a squishy Halloween figure. We got some kudos for our decorations. My granddaughter had fun handing out treats once her own Trick or Treating was done. I’m not sure if they had more fun or we did but it was a lovely night.
I’m hoping you can all report the same.
Until next year, HAPPY HALLOWEEN!
We had a great evening! We sat outside in costumes for a bit and passed out candy. I wish we got more trick-or-treaters, but we sure made it worth it for the ones that made it to our house!
I enjoyed reading the traditions and comments from all of you.
Rose – yikes! That’s terrifying!
JCS – this post was more about personal experiences than about the worst thing you read on the Internet that you then universalized and assumed everyone does the Worst Thing Ever. Rose can be cynical about Halloween. You just need to log off and hang around little kids dressed up like princesses and video game characters.
20 years ago when I bought a house in an area that has lots of children and young families (in Central California), I bought soooo much candy, expecting trick o’ treaters galore! Our porch light was on and the door open (with just the screen door shut). NOT. A. SINGLE. TRICK O’ TREATER! Over the years, I can count on ONE hand the amount of times anyone rang my doorbell on Halloween, and one of those times might have just been a package delivery! I’ve never bought any candy for trick o’ treaters since that first disappointing year. I have so many fond memories getting dressed up and trick o’ treating, but I think that’s largely been replaced by trunk o’ treat events by churches and schools.