My daughter volunteered* that her stepdad balked this year at taking her and her step-/half-siblings to trick-or-treat at the college dorms because the candy wasn’t good enough. So he drove them to a known “good spot” ten miles from their home.
The way I did it as a kid and the way that seems ethical to me is that your parents don’t drive you anywhere, you just walk from your home around your own neighborhood. Meanwhile, your own parents give out treats to other neighborhood kids.
Maybe some really hard up parents would not have enough money to buy candy, although surely a bag of candy corn is fairly minimal in price. But that’s why at least around here, the existence of the college dorm trick-or-treating provides a nice alternative. To turn one’s nose up at that candy, offered without any implicit social contract of anything being offered in return other than cute kids in costumes, rubs me the wrong way.
I make a point of not quizzing her or her brother about what goes on at their mom’s house. But they just bring it up on their own sometimes.
I don’t really see the problem. My neighborhood is full of young twenty somethings who all head out on Halloween night to the bars and clubs. It would be slim pickings here. Most people with kids head south a bit where the streets are full of trick or treaters. Two years ago I stayed home with a bowl of candy. No one came to the door all night.
Not everyone lives within walking distance of others or somewhere with a safe walking route.
I love trick or treaters and if people carted their kids to my neighborhood and I got to give out more candy, I’d be glad.
I have mixed feelings about this. I used to live in a neighborhood that was the sort of neighborhood that people would shuttle their kids over for trick-or-treating.
We were expecting trick-or-treaters, but not…hordes and hordes of them. We’d bought a big bag of candy, thinking we would have a quaint time handing out candy while putting on some Halloween movie as we waited for the kids, but when we peered out the window it was like Night of the Living Dead, only kid-sized. I think a reasonable estimate was a little over 300 children, but maybe even more. It was terrifying and my husband and I had to flee the scene and go to a bar for a few hours. We would never have had enough candy to placate them anyway. So I saw the cars arriving from all over, children spilling out of them like clown cars, said “What the fuck? They’re bringing kids here from other neighborhoods? That’s not fair- we shouldn’t have to spend 80 bucks on candy like this…”
Sure it’s not fair to the kids who live in crappy candy neighborhoods, but it’s pretty taxing to have hundreds of children yelling and screaming at you for three hours straight, demanding candy. We were hoping for something calmer, like 30 or 40 children- not 300+.
It’s just trick-or-treating, not a matter of ethics at all. It’s all in fun and anyone who is going to be petty enough to worry about something like that should just not participate at all.
My daughter goes in my mom’s neighborhood because it’s all apartments in secure buildings here and there’s no trick-or-treating.
I understand not wanting hundreds of kids to come, but then just answer the door for how many you want, and then turn off your lights.
Basically, I don’t care. Turn on the porch light, little kids show up in their adorable Halloween costumes, they say “Trick or treat!”, I hand out the candy, they say “Thank you!” Repeat until we run out of candy. Then turn off the porch light and don’t answer the doorbell.
So maybe some of the kids I gave candy to lived outside my neighborhood. So what? It’s Halloween. What am I supposed to do, ask for ID?
Lots of kids from other parts of town come to my neighborhood to trick-or-treat. As far as I am concerned, they are welcome. I’m sure it’s more fun than trick-or-treating in the projects or out where the houses are too far apart. Now, if they are just neighborhood-hopping to get more loot, they shouldn’t be going farther than they can walk.
I practically could have written the exact same thing. We bought what we thought was plenty of candy the first year living in our current house, and “plenty” lasted about a half hour, tops. When I went on an emergency run to get more, cars were parked on both sides of the street on all the main streets of the subdivision, and people were walking everywhere, on sidewalks, all over the street (real safe)…it was bedlam. Kids from apartment complexes and other neighborhoods and God knows where else had ALL come to our neighborhood…driven by their parents.
I bought a bunch of cheap crappy candy like Smarties – instead of more of the good candy we blew through in the first hour – and my wife had to just stand on the sidewalk and pass it out like a factory assembly line, being stingy with it so there would be enough for the hundreds and hundreds of kids walking by. It was no use staying inside, the doorbell was ringing far too often. These kids didn’t say thanks, their parents had crappy attitudes, and for a night we were looking forward to (first time handing out candy as homeowners), it ended up being miserable. People even showed up well past the posted end time for trick or treating. I told them to take a hike.
We no longer stay home on Halloween…we find something – anything – else to do. I feel bad because I’d love to hand out candy to kids that are actually my neighbors, but I have no interest in taking part in what it actually is. It was awful.
I know some kids live out in the country or whatever, and maybe blending into a neighborhood is a good idea. But when a neighborhood gets completely taken over by people who don’t live there, that’s too far for me. I wouldn’t be a part of it on either side.
My in-laws in Memphis get tons of kids from other neighborhoods, presumably because they’re in a safe area, and lots of other parts of Memphis … well, I wouldn’t go knocking on doors.
When I was a kid we would go to the “rich” part of town for trick or treating. Not only was there better candy, but there were a lot more kids in that neighborhood and it was just a better experience.
My in-laws live in an affluent neighborhood and get a lot of kids from the inner city. The racial aspect makes some people in the neighborhood uncomfortable, but I don’t see anything wrong with it as long as the kids are polite.
I live just outside some seriously bad ghetto and on/near some fairly level streets. More than 80% of the kids we get are “temporary” basically because its safer. It doesn’t bother me at all - if I lived where some of them do I wouldn’t want to go door to door on my own street either. It has caused many of my neighbors though to stop participating and some of our locals to “temp” places themselves where you have every house giving out something.
I’m glad I’m not the only one. Sure, the simplest retort is “Just turn out your porch light.” But if 300 kids are swarming the neighborhood and yelling and screaming, just see how well that works. They ring the doorbell anyway. Last year was the absolute worst- I left work slightly early in order to get home, walk the dog and flee the neighborhood before the kids showed up, but I didn’t even get a chance to finish walking the dog before I was getting harassed from all sides. It was 4:45. We disabled the doorbell before heading out too, so that the dog wouldn’t be in a panic from people ringing it all night.
You nailed it- the kids come in such a steady and numerous stream that there’s no point in going inside. You just have to stand there and pass out candy nonstop for 3-4 hours straight, while the kids are screaming and demeanding and definitely not cute at all.
We do make a point to go out every year on Halloween to avoid this, but we dislike feeling like we’re forced out of our own house every year. If we wanted to stay home, we’d have to disable the doorbell and sit in the dark all night.
I used to live in old fogey’s neighborhood which was close to some pretty poor subdivisions. The whole street looked forward to Halloween. We were happy to give out candy by the bucketful.
It was raining here last night and some neighborhoods kinda put out the word that they would do trick or treating tonight instead. Our neighborhood didn’t cotton to such a notion and the kids did their candy grubbing on the proper All Hallows Eve. Would it be wrong of me to take my youngest to some of these other neighborhoods tonight to double up on the trick or treating? I’m tempted, as sort of an extra candy tax on the coddling parents in these neighborhoods.
I don’t think it’s unethical but I really wish the parents would quit driving their kids to every house. Park and walk, it’s a big part of the experience.