It happens all the time in our town - a suburb in Westchester, just above The Bronx. I regularly open the door on Halloween - especially during the “second wave” when it is not the 5:30pm very young kids making the circuit - to find a porch FULL of kids who are not from anywhere close by.
90% of the time it is a non-issue; I don’t care about where they’re from, their race or their socio-economic status if they are kids dressed up and having a good ol’ Halloween time. What grinds my grain is when I open the door and it is a bunch of teenagers, with no costumes, hold out big honkin’ bags and with their baritone voices saying “trick or treat” - but only barely. In this case, it bothers me that they aren’t local - mainly because if they WERE local, I would know who they are, could tell them “No” and let their parents know, who would no doubt tell them to knock it off. With random teens, that option doesn’t exist - grr…
I haven’t had a single trick-or-treater in 20 years. The little triplet kids next door will be my first ones! However, I’ll probably just make up some cool Halloween baskets for them and ask them to stop by to show me their costumes prior to them going out.
I had no idea people were choosy about who trick-or-treats in their neighborhood. When we were kids, we covered miles of territory between our house and the big roads surrounding our 'hood. Our goal was to get as much candy as our bag would hold without bottoming out.
When Kid Kalhoun was little, well…that whole Tylenol murders thing happened shortly before Halloween, so that kind of took a permanent dump on trick-or-treating as we knew it. He was limited to our immediate block where we knew everyone, and I had to inspect everything. Halloween innocence died that year.
I would welcome it! Last year, we got about 6 kids. This year, there may be a couple more. Of course, living in an apartment complex, it’s not exactly a shocker. I may follow the advice of the green lantern up thread and take over door answering duties for my girlfriend’s brother & sil, so they can both go out with their kids…
It wouldn’t even cross my mind to be upset or spread stories about such a behavior – Halloween is about kids in costumes getting candy, damnit. Oh, and scaring the same kids. My girlfriend and I had to borrow her nephews so we could get into certain events in the area in costume to do that last year – and the kids, and parents, all loved it. (Well, except the one…)
The neighborhood where i lived in Baltimore was predominantly white, middle class professionals, but at Halloween the majority of the trick-or-treaters were black families.
They didn’t have to come very far, because Baltimore really is a city of relatively small neighborhoods, and there were a couple of predominantly black neighborhoods not far from us. I don’t think any of them were car-pooled in or anything like that; it’s just that they didn’t have any problem with crossing neighborhood borders to trick or treat. Which i think is good.
We did have one rather odd set of practices in our area, which i found sort of troubling in some ways (i started a thread about it at the time, and if the crappy Search function was working i could link to it).
The folks in our neighborhood who had children (as i said, mainly white, middle class professionals) had a sort of agreement whereby they always did their trick-or-treating on the Sunday before October 31. So, if October 31 fell on a Tuesday, they would go out trick-or-treating on Sunday, October 29.
But all the surrounding neighborhoods (almost exclusively black, working class) would trick-or-treat on the actual day of Halloween, October 31.
What this left us with was:
a) the annoyance of having to deal with 2 days of trick-or-treating
b) an effectively segregated Halloween
I’m not accusing the folks in our neighborhood of deliberately setting out to segregate Halloween, but that’s what happened, and i found the whole thing a bit uncomfortable.
I’m a honky and I used to take my kids to the “good” neighborhoods to trick-or-treat. These days I live in a nice neighborhood, and yeah, we get tons of people in who don’t live there. There are plenty of block parties going on, “haunted houses”, and we pool our giving-candy with the neighbors. There are so many people out on the streets that night, there’s hardly room to walk. It’s good.
I don’t think anybody has a problem with anything except the uncostumed teenagers, and with everyone out milling around and free food and booze and whatnot, the teens don’t tend to actually knock on people’s doors. As it gets later, the roving packs of teenagers get assholier, the little kids go in, and the adults start putting away the tables and coolers.
There aren’t very many black people in my town–maybe 6–but certainly we get lots of trick-or-treaters from other neighborhoods; my area is fairly popular. The more the merrier, IMO; I’m not happy unless the doorbell rings every couple of minutes on Halloween, and since more and more people are opting for sanitized, supervised Trunk-or-Treats and such, that doesn’t happen much any more. I tell all my friends who live in the country to come to my neighborhood.
At our last house, a nice neighborhood, but not exactly ritzy, we would get a number of hispanic groups of kids coming through. Since there weren’t any hispanic families next door, I always assumed the came from the trailer park about a mile away.
Cool. I love seeing little girls in princess costumes and little boys as Batman.
I live in a small town, with only one real suburban street. All the kids in town (and a couple of the neighboring towns) hit these 30 or so houses. The town takes up a candy collection each year, so that these homeowners don’t have to shoulder the entire cost themselves.
I did when I was little, and I am E. Indian. But we went with kids of pepole who lived in the neighborhood already. I always felt a little bad, but I know my parents were trying to do right by me.
It isn’t just the better candy, you know. It’s also safer in those ritzy neighborhoods. Or at least in my parents’ mind it was.
I used to live two doors down from the woman who created that little area in Evanston. We lived on the 1100 block of Wesley and she would create an elaborate front and back yard walk through fun house. Admission was one piece of candy. There were moving displays, music, and she would have a couple of the local teenagers dress up and pop out of the shadows.
She welcomed us to the neighborhood and warned us about the ruckus. I remember buying 50 bucks worth of candy and it was ALL gone by the end of the night. She’s since moved a couple blocks due west and I have moved as well but I still hear she is going strong.
We live in a “nice”, central, and fairly concentrated neighborhood in a very rural area. Everybody in the county comes to trick-or-treat in our neighborhood. We had candy for 300 kids last year and ran out early.
The only problem with it is that there’s a one-lane bridge in and out of the neighborhood, so congestion is horrible. I wish the neighborhood would get together and encourage or even require people to park on the other side of the bridge and walk over. They could run a shuttle.
I estimate based on last year’s count. The first year we happened to get lucky and guess right.
This is an issue everywhere since they moved the end of Daylight Savings Time back a week. “Official” trick or treat was always 6-8PM, and it’s just starting to get dark at 8:00 now.
There are two schools of thought: buy what you like and buy a lot, so that leftovers get eaten. The second is buy what you hate, so that leftovers DON’T get eaten!
Really, you just ask your neighbors the first year or guess.
And when you run out, please please please turn off your porch light/close your door/use whatever your local “sorry, not participating!” signal is! Those 7 steps up to your front door are a lot for a two year old in a dragon costume to manage! Not to mention Mom, who gets left behind slowly going back down the stairs with the two year old while the older kids make a dash for the next house. Handing out candy slows the suckers down; empty houses with ambiguous lighting/decorations screws up the rhythm that keeps the older ones and the little ones together. If you don’t want to play, that’s totally cool, but give us some sort of clue so we don’t bother you by ringing your bell.
MikeG, don’t be givin’ my spot away! It’ll be overrun with Dopers this year!
Absolutely. Back when I lived in the city of Alameda ( islandish town in the SF Bay Area, very safe, moderately racially mixed and moderately affluent ), folks from neighboring Oakland ( much poorer, less safe at night as a generalization ) came across the tube/bridge every Halloween.
My roommate was annoyed by it, since to him the holiday was a “neighborhood thing.” I told him he was fucking crazy and that I had nothing but respect for anybody who would take their kids some place they could have a better, safer time.
'course I have to admit that personally I’m a curmudgeon about Halloween and avoid being home to hand out junk whenever possible ( often easy, as I work evenings ). But if forced into the situation I reluctantly buy candy and play the good citizen.
I experienced this alleged phenomenom when I lived in Pasadena. I’m personally so creeped out by the concept of kids ringing my doorbell that I always spent the evening with some friends. They were a little compulsive about things, so the mother of the house kept a little clicker to count the number of kids who came to the door (so she could predict how much candy to buy the next year). I only remember the tally for one year because it was easy to remember – 365 kids.
However, attempting to read between the lines, here, we didn’t think it was wrong that parents were driving their kids to the good neighborhoods … why would you want to have them wander around in the dark ringing on strangers’ doorbells in bad neighborhoods? I went trick or treating in Queens, NY when I was a kid, and I’d much rather have had the opportunity to go to Pasadena.
Of course, the friends I hung out with were the family of my roommate’s girlfriend, so basically my MO was to come over to their house at least once a week and get a free dinner, which is pretty much the same thing as trick or treating, except I didn’t have to wear a costume.
We also base our candy-buying estimate on the previous year. But then we factor in the weather forecast. If there’s a sleet storm predicted, we cut down on the haul. (Ohio Halloweens vary from 70 to 30 degrees.) And the influx of non-resident trick-or-treaters is far from a sure thing. I see this as a total crap shoot and throw up my hands in frustration. The only way is to wildly overbuy and be stuck with candy I shouldn’t be eating.
We get a lot of imports here, too. After being here ten years, I just estimate on last years count.
However, a lot of drug stores and discount stores like Kmart give Halloween candy guarantees now, just keep your receipt and bring back any unopened bags for a refund. So maybe that’s the way to go?
Another vote for polite children from outside the neighborhood over surly teens from nearby.
Until recently I lived in an upper-middle-class neighborhood adjacent to a few lower-middle-class neighborhoods. One year I was overwhelmed with “imports.” The next year I increased the candy supply, had no visitors, and gorged myself to the point of illness on November 1. The third year I bought no candy and spent the night hiding in my darkened room while wave after wave of trick-or-treaters pounded on the door.
One Halloween I thought it would be fun to serve the candy from inside a plastic shark model I happened to have. To add to the effect I bandaged up one hand and added some stage blood.
I discovered that 5-year-olds do not share my sense of whimsy.
Handing out candy slows the suckers down; empty houses with ambiguous lighting/decorations screws up the rhythm that keeps the older ones and the little ones together. If you don’t want to play, that’s totally cool, but give us some sort of clue so we don’t bother you by ringing your bell.