That’s what makes it so sweet.
I live on a little dead-end street in a nice neighborhood. It’s quiet here 364 days a year . . . Halloween is the exception.
My neighbor, three doors up, is a prominent local citizen who LOVES him some Halloween! He buys super-sized candy bars, makes his house a haunted spook show, and, best (worst?) of all, gets written up in the newspaper and featured on the local news every October 31. So, yeah, parents drive their kids here in numbers so great that the police have to direct traffic on this little cul-de-sac.
Our choice has always been to participate. We could turn out the lights and huddle in the dark, or go swig Appletinis at Guthrie’s, but we prefer to light the jack o’lantern, stock up on Milky Ways, and enjoy the madness. The kids are unfailingly polite and cute, are always accompanied by parents who remind them to say “thank you,” and leave surprisingly little mess behind. If this were not the case, we would opt out.
This year, we handed out candy to just under 600 kids.
Our favorite this year was a 10-year-old Ghostbuster with “Spengler” embroidered on his uniform. My nerdy husband asked him what his first name was, and when the kid replied “Egon” my husband threw an extra handful of candy in the lad’s pillowcase with the comment, “Egon, your mucus.”
OK, everyone. Time to put up the Christmas decorations! 
Annoyed I can’t figure this one out … my wife meets up with our neighbor (who admittedly goes a little nuts with decorations) to get a count on how many kids.
We had like a dozen she had easily three or four times that. It’s townhouses, so it’s not like it’s more than a 25 or 30 ft walk from one door to the next. So weird.
Maybe my dalek-o-lantern scared them off…
All I know is that my husband has already eaten all of the good stuff that I was planning to steal from my daughter’s candy stash (at two, she’s not quite ready for most of it.)
I typically get a good crowd of courteous, well-costumed young Trick or Treaters at my door. I too, offer a big bowl of mixed variety candies to the kiddies and their small hands usually only grab one or two pieces. They say “thank you” and go off on their merry way.
No problem…until I opened the door to a bratty young teen and his dad. Neither was wearing a costume (unless their costume was “Typical Walmart Slob”). Neither one said a word. Reluctantly, I held out my big bowl and the untidy Justin Bieber look-a-like put his big paw in and grabbed a large handful of candy. That was bad enough, but, as I was pulling the bowl away, Dad sticks his big paw in and grabs an even larger handful of candy and puts it in his son’s bag.
If these were poor people, I’d be happy to give them all the candy they wanted, but, judging by the Rolex on Dad’s dirty paw, I don’t think that was the case.
I was about to give Dad a piece of my mind, but a tiny Cinderella and witch were approaching the doorway, so I held my tongue. I just snarked, “a man your age ought to be a little worried about diabetes.”
I’m still peeved about my Trick or Treating in New Jersey when I was 7 years old. I had a great costume (hobo, with burnt-cork dirtied face, torn clothes and a broomstick & bag over my shoulder). On just the third house my friends and I went to, a middle-aged battle-ax of a woman opened the door and gave us each single gumball (bitch).
It gets worse:
Then, she guilt-tripped me (the hobo, of all people) into taking one of her UNICEF charity buckets and canvas the neighborhood for donations! Fat-ass was too lazy to do it herself, I suppose.
So there I am collecting nickels and dimes for some charity I had no clue about, while my buddies were collecting Snickers and M&Ms and Tootsie Rolls and…
Worst Halloween ever!
We get the Hispanic families, large families from outside the neighborhood. We love them, tons of super shy little kids. But this year the parents or friends came and as the kids walked our streets, the adults played mariachi music–not taped–they stood out there with their instruments as the kids came to the door. It was magic.
I hand out Nestlé’s Halloween special chocolate bars - Coffin Crisp, Scaero, KitKat, and Scaries. They add a little extra scary yumminess to a kid’s candy haul.
All the kids were polite (we ARE Canadian), even the little princess who held out her cupped hands while explaining the she DID have a bag but her Dad had to carry it because it was too heavy for her. The big hit of the night was when the neighbour’s cat came over and laid down on the bench beside our door. Every kid had to stop and pet him while he enjoyed all the attention.
Last year we participated in the teal pumpkin thing and ran out of non-candy treats (we had glow in the dark wands and swords). This year, along with the candy, we doubled the non-candy treats… and gave away one. So now I have a slug of Halloween-centered gift bags. Good thing they can probably be saved for next year.
All kids and parents were well behaved, at least. When neighborhood lights started being turned off, I took the remaining candy in the bucket and found a random teen walking by and gave him the rest. He said he won the lottery.
My peeve - someone was giving away full sized cans of Mountain Dew. Yesterday, I found 8 empty cans in my yard. Thanks.
I knew a guy that would have a bowl of candy and a bowl of ice by the door. When he saw some jerky kids with paper sacks, he would put a handful of candy and a handful of ice in their bags.
We didn’t do Halloween this year (left the porch light off.) Last several years we’ve had hardly anyone come by. We’re on a cul-de-sac and there’s a more prosperous neighborhood just a few minutes’ drive away.
When we first moved to this neighborhood 15 odd years ago, we were one of four houses. We HAD to drive over to the prosperous neighborhood so the kids could go trick or treating.
Nowadays the kids are in their 20s, and their idea of Halloween is to dress up and party or dress up and go to work. Their days of trick or treating are over.
What are the limits on this driving thing? I drove my kids (5 and 3) to the subdivision across the street from me because it was pouring rain and I live on a main road without any neighbors who pass out candy. Should I force my kids to play Frogger on the unlit, hilly 35 MPH road just to go to an actual subdivision?
Yeah, my wife took the bag of Snickers she bought for Halloween into the office today. She was going to buy two bags, but I vetoed the second bag. We got zero trick-or-treaters.
Our neighborhood has aged in place: when we moved in 17 years ago, we’d be deluged with kids trick-or-treating, but not any more. There are kids trick-or-treating in our neighborhood, but I’m a few houses from the end of the neighborhood, and between the last cross-street and where we are, the road goes over a slight rise, plus there’s a bend in the road. Since the houses between the last cross-street and the rise-and-bend are all dark on Halloween, nobody bothers to see if there are any houses handing out candy further down.
Anyhow, I took the Firebug trick-or-treating Saturday night, and since the houses that were handing out candy weren’t getting that many kids coming by, they were very generous with the candy, and when the Firebug started complaining that the bag was too heavy, I suggested that that meant we should call it a night.
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!
We were in a new neighborhood this year. Last Halloween we had 200-300 people and every house was passing out candy. Our new neighborhood is older and only about every third or fourth house was passing out candy and we had about 50 - 75 people.
I do have one comment.
I can understand decorating your house with scary Halloween. I can understand not wanting unwelcome people at your home. On the one day of the year though when you are going to have strangers of all ages coming to your door could you do something about the signs that say “Tresspassers will be killed” or “There’s nothing in this house worth your life” with a gun pointing at them? I was seriously wondering if they wanted us there or not. My son thought that was scarier than the skeleton and zombie house.
For the fifth year in a row we had no kids. It was magical.
Speaking of teens and costumes, it was like Girl Power Night on my street or something. Had girls (age 12-15?) dressed as Supergirl, a soldier or hunter, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, a Transformer of some sort and other stuff I don’t remember. No kittens or witches to be seen. Friends on Facebook were posting a lot of daughters dressed as video game figures, super heroes/villains and other stuff not involving cat ears or witch hats.
(hope it goes without saying that I’m not actually pitting this fact)
Our neighborhood is a big destination. We have off-duty cops on patrol and people directing cars where to park. It’s pretty great when you have your own little trick-or-treaters to take around, but we didn’t this year. So we dropped off some candy with the neighbors and got away before darkness fell.
We wound up downtown watching the college students walk around in their costumes. My favorite was a guy who had on a common storebought wizard hat, but the rest of his costume was a raggedy green bathrobe, complete with hanging sash. 
Try not to be too hard on the teenagers who show up without a costume. When I was 15, my parents’ marriage was falling apart, their new baby was stressing them out, and a grandparent was dying. I didn’t get invited to any Halloween parties, and I didn’t have my shit together enough to have a costume that year. I went trick or treating anyway, just to not feel like a complete loser. Some adults scolded me.
Just remember, you have no idea what that kid is dealing with at home. Just smile and give them the damned candy.
Actually, theres no social contract. Just turn off your lights and don’t give out candy if everything is going to be a problem.
What got me more is the racial coding in this post (Ill skip the wink wink thoughts on the behavior of the children):
Come clean. You are ranting about black people coming into your neighborhood to trick or treat, aren’t you?