I tell ya – I remember those days all too well, when I used to dress up and run around with the rest of the neighborhood kids, collecting all sorts of goodies and threatening “tricks,” even though we were too young at that point to even understand what that meant. You know, back in the time when there was a “haunted house” on every block and the only time you dared even step foot back in your own house was when you needed to swap out for a fresh bag! Before these more recent days when I became a “giant ‘fraidy-cat wuss,” I loved Halloween just as much as the next kid, but something tells me if you were to do a survey in this day and age, you might not exactly get the same results…
…or even anything close…
Back in the days when I used to spend those Halloween nights trick or treating with friends, I also recall my parents having their evening’s work cut out for themselves, manning the front door, surrounded by bags upon bags of candy that Mom had bought weeks prior at the grocery store, and taking shifts until they were certain that every ghoul and ghost to ring our doorbell got the treats that they were entitled to that night. And at the end of it all, we always knew just how successful the night was not only by surveying the mountain of candy that I had collected, but also by means of a tally sheet that Mom insisted on keeping so that she would know how much candy to buy next year. Sure, it was kind of a pain when I’d step in for a few minutes here and there, but it was important to Mom so we did it anyways!
Figure these were probably the late 80’s and early 90’s – Mom usually considered a couple of hundred kids to be a good year, in our small, Northern Michigan town, anyways. And as far as I can remember, these numbers actually managed to stay pretty constant throughout my own trick or treating career, possibly decreasing just slightly at the very end, but still nowhere near what she reports back to me nowadays. Ten to fifteen years later, Mom only sees a fraction of the trick or treaters that she used to, sometimes to the point where she ponders whether its actually worth turning the porch light on and giving out candy at all. Of course, when all is said and done I know that she’d never come to this because my Mom loves kids and always has some candy around the house regardless of whether its Halloween or not, but that said, I also know she wouldn’t mind seeing a few more costumes at her doorstep on Halloween than she has in recent years…
Unfortunately, the fact of the matter is that a lot of kids these days don’t go trick or treating, and I, myself, am still trying to figure out exactly why that is and how we came to this point. I have a couple of theories of my own, but as with every Against the Grain… column that I write, I’m always interested to hear your feedback, thoughts and ideas, so if you’ve got an explanation of your own that I haven’t covered or just want to tell me how wrong you think I am, feel free to drop me an e-mail and give me a piece of your mind! We may not always (or ever!) agree, but I definitely subscribe to the idea that the best way to broaden your horizons is to surround yourself with people who think differently than yourself … even if we are just talking about trick or treating this week!
Anyways, my prime suspect for the recent decline in trick or treating is of course, that almighty concern for safety and security. Mind you, we can all remember those safety warnings that we used to get as children – always go trick or treating with a buddy and never eat anything until it’s been inspected by an adult – although despite that crazy story of the kid who bit into an apple or a piece of candy and found a razor blade, I’ve still got a feeling that it was little more than an urban legend. Nonetheless, it worked and anything not stamped with Hershey’s or Nestle was left aside for Mom and Dad to peruse – there was plenty of better candy to be had than anything that you could hide a razor in anyways, right?
Well, fast forward a decade (or more, for some of us) and today we live in a society that’s absolutely obsessed with security, many would argue to the point of paranoia. We shutter at the thought of “liquids” being brought on planes, more and more families are living in “gated communities” with the guardhouse and everything out front in an attempt to make themselves feel safer, and it seems that more often than not, those cherished days of running around the neighborhood, playing with the kids next door has been traded in for soccer practice, piano lessons, and other “more-supervised” extracurricular activities deemed, for lack of a better term, “safer.” You don’t see a lot of children just playing outdoors anymore, and whether its due to a fear of kidnapping or violence or perhaps even just parents not trusting their kids – I don’t know.
But as I look back at how my friends and I trick or treated over the years, I just have a difficult time buying the idea that we were being terribly unsafe while we were out there. Sure, we may have run around our own neighborhood by ourselves, just as we would on any other night of the week playing kick-the-can or tag or whatever, but when it came time to venture forth into the other nearby neighborhoods – even the ones that we’d ride our bikes through during the day – we always had a parent with us, and usually even a couple of them just so they’d have somebody to talk to while we were doing our thing! So with somebody’s Dad never more than a few arm’s lengths away and the candy stash itself being rigorously “inspected” (taste-tested) by any number of appointed adults, I guess I just don’t see what else could be done to be safer other than maybe trick or treating in a bubble.
So that being said, I have to fall back to my backup concept, that of which being that over the years a number of parents have simply decided that it’s easier to take or send their kids to the local church group’s party or the liking, rather than go through the hassles of actually bundling up and spending several hours walking around the neighborhoods in the cold. And mind you, this is only a theory at best, but I know just from reports back from my own little hometown that a lot of this took place and there couldn’t have possibly been a parent for every child hanging out at those parties. I’d hate to think that the cause for the demise of trick or treating as we know it is simply because parents have gotten lazy over the years and would rather dump their kids at a party than take them out door-to-door themselves, but even as I write this, I can hear the rationale in the back of my head: “It’s easier for everybody – the kids get some candy, but they also have healthier treats at the party for kids to enjoy; they’ve also got games for the kids to play instead of running around out in the cold; and while somebody else from church is supervising the whole thing, I get to stay home and watch CSI!!!” Or go to their own Halloween parties of a more adult nature, but either way you get my point.
I don’t know – we all know I’m nostalgic, and maybe these parties are just as fun for the kiddies as my generation had back in the day with actually putting in a little work for our Halloween loot, but whether it be for legitimate concerns of safety in an increasingly chaotic world, an easy night off while the kids are off playing in a trusted environment, or even dare I say the next evolutionary method of celebrating Halloween as our world turns, I still can’t help but be a little disappointed as I watch it take place because a part of me actually really looks forward to taking my own little ones door-to-door on that fateful night as my parents once did for me and I worry that by the time we get to that point in my life, there won’t be any porch lights left on for us to hit.
…except, of course, for my Mom’s, but Northern Michigan is a long ways to travel from Florida in a single night for a few pieces of chocolate!
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