I think the countries where Halloween trick or treating is a custom, need to educate kids in proper trick or treating.
I know the education system is stressed. But it would not take much time. Just a quick going over the basics. Many schools celebrate it anyways with fun things.
The basics.
Wear a costume! Does not have to be fancy. Just make the effort. Impress on kids that it is fun to make your own costume too. When you get to the door, Yell TRICK OR TREAT!!! I can barely hear some of the kids tapping the door. Or not even tapping it at all.
I like Halloween. I like giving out candy. But I want it to remain a somewhat special and fun thing. It seems to be fading away for kids. Adults are the ones who are putting in the effort and tradition. Make Halloween great again for kids.
Halloween is not my favorite holiday. For a couple reasons.
Around here they are transitioning away from door to door. So many people are upset by it.
My grandkids did some Halloween inspired activity every day this week. Had loads of fun and didn’t knock on one door.
Maybe you should move away from asking parents to trust you. You know You. They don’t even know you. Volunteer at a woman and children’s shelter for Halloween. You’ll get the love and respect of all you encounter.
Maybe a children’s hospital will let you pass out treats.
Schools love grandma or aunt stand-ins volunteering. Anyday.
I should move away from asking people to trust me? So I should move away from trusting others?Funnel interpersonal customs and interactions to institutional settings?
I had 30 or more kids come to my door tonight. About half had costumes. Some bought whole, some homemade. We exchanged smiles, thank you and your welcome, happy Halloween.
It was special to have kids in my neighbourhood and their moms and dads stop by my home. It is an act of social cohesion. Communal fun. Not dependant on anyone but me and them. We owned and controlled that personal interaction.
I do not want fun and trust and our social customs to be constrained to institutional settings. I do not want what I had in my life, to be denied to the future lives.
I feel ever more sad for the future of children. Their lives seem destined to institution of every aspect. Lowered expectations and realities. Enforced by fears, relayed by institutions.
My observation is that a lot of parents have become hesitant (frightened?) to take their kids to trick-or-treat at the houses (or allow older kids to do so, without them) of anyone whom they don’t know. Around here, “trunk-or-treat” has become a thing, where people from groups like schools and churches park in a parking lot, with candy, and let the kids go trick-or-treating from car to car.
Ten or fifteen years ago, we’d get so many trick-or-treaters that we’d often run out of candy before the evening ended. Now, it’s not uncommon to only have 15 or 20 kids show up. We see kids out there on our street, often with their parents, but as it’s people we don’t know, they don’t walk up the sidewalk to our house.
Honestly, pretty much everyone who came by my house understood the rules. (Some small children excepted).
We were sitting in the driveway, with a tv tray of candy in front of us. Kids had about 16 pieces of candy to choose from (I’d replenish between groups). Ninety percent of the kids knew without being told that they got one piece of candy, A few of them asked. (I’d say “one piece per person” fairly often, but probably not to every group). Several touched multiple pieces before they picked their actual piece. (I loved the ones that picked up Starburst, set it down and picked up a different Starburst).
If anyone didn’t have a costume, I didn’t notice– it did get pretty dark before we came in. Some of the kids were pretty skimpily dressed, but I worried about them getting cold.
I heard one kid tell his Mom that they should go get the car, and he got an earful from her about cars on Halloween being not the spirit of Halloween and actually unsafe.
I noticed this year that the Nextdoor app had a sign in where you could register your address as being open for trick or treaters. Perhaps more and more parents are using this to only go to homes that are verified. If anything this would save time for them by bypassing homes that are not participating.
I’m a bit torn, because I generally love Halloween for the reasons stated in the OP – it’s a bunch of neighbors being selfless towards children for one night, everyone puts in effort they don’t have to, and it’s fun.
But man, has it gotten commercial. I know, I know, it was already commercial when I was a kid, so this is just me yelling at clouds. But this isn’t some tradition that’s sadly dying after hundreds of years, it’s some boomer shit that maybe has run its course.
“Guising,” according to the wikipedia page about the history of trick-or-treating, is the practice that was brought over by Scottish immigrants, and it sounds very different to what I grew up with – kids visiting their local institutions (stores, public services, neighbors), presumably in small, tight-knit villages to get apples, nuts, and coins. Sounds lovely.
Translated to the post-war suburban boom, it was people trying to create a sense of community in their soul-less planned cookie-cutter “neighborhoods,” passing out mass-produced candy. It’s all tied together. I’m sure boomers loved it growing up, which is why they continued the practice for their kids. But honestly? Halloween is now 1) everyone has costumes from amazon, 2) there’s now a “yard decoration” arms race full of… garbage from amazon, and 3) kids really don’t need a pile of mass-produced junk candy.
But, as with your point about commercialization,
Halloween when I was a kid was,
Everyone had costumes from the “10¢ Store”.
There was a “window and door decoration” arms race full of… garbage from that same “10¢ Store”.
(That was only dwarfed by Christmas decorations and was in a completive arms race with every other holiday if my grandmother’s collection of holiday decorative ephemera that was still is use, by me, more than four decades later has anything to say about it.).
Kids really didn’t need a pile of mass-produced junk candy.
In my generation everyone had a stiff plastic mask held on by a thin elastic band and a thin plastic bag outfit printed with the character on it. Bought from various places.
We were in Glasgow for Halloween when my daughter was 4. We got some really chilly reactions at the first few houses we tried. It’s not that there weren’t any trick or treaters, but they were expected to be people who knew the homeowners. They were also adamant that the kid had to sing a song or tell a joke or something before they got a treat. Eventually, somebody took pity on us and directed us toward a neighborhood that did a more welcoming Halloween; that was fun.
We got several dozen kids last night. All in costume; even the high schoolers. Apparently I should have known more about K-pop Demon Hunters. Towards the end, one group of older girls asked if they could perform a dance. Absolutely!
I’ll bet my Halloween experiences aren’t normal. When my sister and I were kids and walked with our parents, it was completely normal to be invited in to all our neighbors’ homes on Halloween. If I think about it, we walked into everyone’s front door with the owners for twenty seconds each just to hang out a little. They usually had treats for us but talking to people was the greatest thing.
I think it seemed normal to me because my parents and I did this on other days of the year, like the 4th of July, Christmas Eve and some other days. We didn’t have any other motivation but to say hello and know people’s names really. What a freaky tradition, right?
This happened in the mid 1970s. The neighbor girl, who was 4 or years old, broke her leg shortly before Halloween and got a huge cast. I was friends with her sister, so the three of us went trick or treating together, with our dads sharing the task of carrying her.
The neighbors were quite friendly, and offered glasses of wine for the adult, along with the candy for the kids. Both my dad and the other dad were definitely the worse for wear the next day, as they each had enough that they passed out when they got home.
My parents still live in the same house. They got 4 trick or treaters, compared to the hundreds when I was a kid. Many of their neighbors don’t have school-age kids. And trunk or treat events, where everybody knows everybody, are really popular.
It’s lovely. Back in the dark ages when I was a kid, we went out on out own. No parents involved.
My newly adopted neighborhood is pretty cool. These couple of families throw a big party for 4th of July. The get a water slide for the kids, they had a mechanical bull ride, food truck, tents and tables set up in the street (end of the cul-de-sak. It’s BYOB so that’s on whoever comes. We are the third house from the end of the street, so it’s right there. I need to figure out how I can help with all of this. It can’t be cheap, and is labor intensive to get everything set up.
