It’s barely 2:30 and we’re already getting trick or treaters. Our house has something of a rep since we give out comic books every year.
It’s way better than the days when I was living in Queens, where we would get zero kids coming by. People were so paranoid that kids were only allowed to go around on their own block and only get candy from people they knew.
When I was a kid, I would range far and wide, with groups or solo. My parents had rules, sure: If I was eating en route, only packaged stuff. Anything unpackaged such as cookies or fruit or candy apples (yes, some people gave those out) were to be held until I got home, and if it was from someone I didn’t know really well, into the garbage it went. But there was a lot more freedom.
Is the world really that much more dangerous? Or is everyone just way more paranoid?
PAD
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Way more paranoid…plus, there are fewer and fewer homes to go to. People either don’t give out candy or’ like my wife and I, are out having fun. You ahve to hit 4 or 5 houses to score 1 tootsie roll. Halloween isn’t much a kid’s holiday any more. Which is sad, even if I am part of the problem.
I think there is a few things going on.
One, as Bill pointed out, many adults are enjoying Halloween in the form of parties. The focus is away from the kids.
Two, Many parents my age (I’d say 20s-30s) seem to be taking their own kids Trick-or-Treating (as opposed to say, a group of 5 or 6 kids together) and don’t go as long or far as the old style group would.
Three, many parents ARE more paranoid and take the kids only to houses they know, like relatives.
Four, at least in my parent’s neighborhood, all the kids who roamed the neighborhood when I was young have gone on to move out, leaving their parent’s homes children-less. There just aren’t as many kids in the neighborhood anymore, and thus less Trick-or-Treating.
Five, at least in Rochester, NY, every Halloween that I can remember for the last 5-6 years has been pretty rainy and miserable out. That never was a problem with me when I was a kid but for the parents, sure.
The of course you have the other, smaller reasons—the religious fringe who frown upon Halloween as a pagan holiday and the growing concern over child obesity—that lends to a decrease in the amount of Treaters.
Czar, when my girlfriend and I lived in a townhouse community in Perinton (a suburb of Rochester for those of you not in the area) it was tough to gauge how much candy to buy for Halloween. For the first two or three years we ended up throwing most of it away. The one year we got slammed with kids and I almost exhausted the whole supply.
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It was fun, though. The kids were cute and well-behaved (although one of them must’ve thought I was a dork, asking him if he was supposed to be Harry Potter when he was dressed as one of the band members from Green Day). The highlight of the evening: two high-school-aged girls came by, one dressed as a caricature of a cheerleader, the other as a corpse. The former did a cheer, while the other one did a macabre pose. I gave them extra candy in return for their efforts.
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I just bought a house in Henrietta this year and I have no idea what to expect. It’s 4:30 p.m. now so I should know soon.
Wow, sounds like those teenagers knew that they were expected to go above and beyond to get candy. Glad to see some of those kids with character are still out there.
My girlfriend and I get annoyed when teenagers show up in street clothes on Halloween and want candy. These two young girls were creative as all get-out, though, and I welcome anyone willing to exhibit that kind of imagination to ring my doorbell on Halloween.
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“My girlfriend and I get annoyed when teenagers show up in street clothes on Halloween and want candy.”
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Man that pìššëš me off. Seriously, even if someone wants to defend that garbage and say that the economy sucks and money is tight; you can get a $5 makeup kit that has enough white, black, red and green in it to turn four kids into passable zombies or ghouls. Besides, there were lazy SOBs knocking on my door in the 80’s and 90’s when the economy was good who were just dogging it when it came to Halloween. They’d show up with no costume and a grocery store paper bag and then complain if they thought you didn’t give them enough for their half assed efforts.
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Hëll, even when I was five I would have been embarrassed to go trick or treating after using that little effort or imagination. But, dámņ, do I ever see a lot of that these days.
Our answer is two separate buckets of candy: one with the good stuff, the other with cheap candy. Which bucket a trick-or-treater gets swag from is a direct correlation to the quality of his or her costume. (Quality effort = Quality candy; Generic costume = Generic candy).
I admit, the last time I went trick or treating (myself, not as a parent escorting my kid around), I was basically in street clothes.
I hadn’t been planning on going at all (I was in junior high, which I generally feel is a bit too old for this sort of thing). However, my mom didn’t want my brother (4 years younger) going alone.
Well, since I wasn’t prepared, the best I could do on a moment’s notice was to try to hang my bag from bent-up coat-hanger – the idea being I stood off to the side, and would be “invisible”. Didn’t work well [OK, basically didn’t work *at all*], but no one complained (I probably tried to explain the whole thing to them, knowing me, which was likely to defuse the situation somewhat).
With the rise of the internet, folks are more comfortable typing on a screen then they are meeting people face to face. Worse, anonymity changes behavior when there is no reprisal for rudeness, and politeness is becoming scarcer. It comes across that people are generally mean or just ‘bad people’, and trust suffers for it.
I find people are far more insular than in days past. Folks
just want a private corner to live their lives and keep to themselves.
Granted, this is a generalization, and I’m a cynic.
I would at least partially disagree. Politeless isn’t getting scarcer, it’s just becoming unnecessary. The sociologist George Ritzer would argue the ‘McDonaldization’ effect of a large industrial society means efficiency is the key. And frankly, politeness and efficiency don’t necessarily mesh.
*FAR* more paranoid. I feel sorry for kids these days; they’re never left alone to explore and discover the world on their own. Everything has to be structured and there’s always a parent around.
Yep. In MY day we our parents not only allowed us to play in the woods they FORCED us to. “Go play in the woods!” they would yell at us when we got on their nerves. I played in the woods a lot, make of that what you will.
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So far as I know, none of us were eaten by bears or put our eyes out with pointed sticks but if we had it would have just been One Of Those Things. A learning experience (Don’t tease bears! Don’t run with sticks!) those who survived would have been the better for it and society as a whole would benefit. Small wonder things are going to hëll in a handbasket.
Don’t tease bears! Don’t run with sticks!
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Were I your father, I might have encouraged you to do both. 😉
Heck, I’d’ve told you to tease the bears WITH the sticks!
Is the world really that much more dangerous? Or is everyone just way more paranoid?
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The latter, I suspect. According to Snopes.com, there has never been a documented case of poisoned candy being given out on Halloween. There have been documented cases of kids receiving treats with foreign objects in them, but it’s been so few that you’ve got a better chance of being struck by lightning while winning the lottery than your kids have of getting a treat that’s been tampered with.
If I give out really crappy comics, do you think I might be opening up myself up to a lawsuit for intentionally inflicting emotional distress?
Peter, I’ve been wondering this for years, but what types of comics do you give out? I’ve wanted to give out comics, but I was never sure how to do it in an affordable way.
Do you give out the comp copies of stuff you get? Do you order stuff in bulk? Go through the 10cent bins and grab anything that’s aimed at kdis?
For the most part we give out comp copies.
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PAD
I just hope you’re not giving out copies of “Alternative Comics #2” 🙂
We’ve started giving out comics as well — Previews has sets of 25 mini-comics in their July catalog that are pretty affordable and have a range of topics (Archie, Star Wars, Bone, etc.). Those worked pretty well last night.
“People were so paranoid that kids were only allowed to go around on their own block and only get candy from people they knew.”
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The world is more dangerous BECAUSE we don’t know our neighbors. In the days where everyone knew everyone on the block, it would have been a lot harder for a psychopath to go undetected. Granted, there will always be predators who can pass for normal, but the phenomenon of neighbors being strangers makes it that much more likely.
YES. We need to know our neighbors. It’s sad that I live in a neighborhood that I don’t know people’s names… more people are no longer out and about in their streets because the emphasis is largely on work, school, or play, not fellowship at home. Tea parties and Bridge are unfortunately, a thing of the past.
People just aren’t as sociable these days. On my reading list is a book called Bowling Alone. It studies various social research, including findings that people aren’t joiners as much as previous generations.
I’ve lived in the same neighborbood my whole life. I can remember when we would get trick-or-treaters the day before Halloween. Even recently, I had neighbors who would decorate their yard and cover their porch with black tarp, put on scary music, and create a mini-haunted house.
Kids can now get candy from churches, boys/girls clubs, and fire stations. They are still being social but they are not getting to know their neighbors. This year may see less kids going door-to-door due to H1N1.
Peter David: Is the world really that much more dangerous? Or is everyone just way more paranoid?
Luigi Novi: The latter. The current wariness regarding Halloween candy stems from that whole razor blades/poison-in-apples/candy panic from the 70s and 80s, whose only substantiated fact was that of one case which turned out to be a premeditated murder by a trick-or-treater’s father. I would imagine that the ’82 Tylenol scare didn’t help either. Most murders, after all, are not committed by strangers, and most deaths from things ingested are probably not from deliberate poisonings. Kids are more likely to be killed by bikes, swimming pools, poisonous cleaning agents in the house, and five-gallon buckets.
I’m not a health nut, let me just say that up front. In fact, I think most of the “organic” brands are ripoffs that take advantage of the misinformed. That said, I really wish I could give apples and such to trick or treaters tonight. Does that make me a buzz kill for the kids? I just don’t want to promote a lifestyle I don’t agree with. At the same time, it’s not my business to tell people how to raise their kids, so I’m giving blowpops.
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Nah… Just tell ’em it’s sports candy. Although, that line would be helped greatly if you dressed in all blue and could do a full split while leaping into the air…
People are excessively paranoid these days (and have been for some time, actually). I was going to mention how there has never been a proven case of tampering with Hallowe’en candy, and how the apple-razor blade story was just a rumour from 1970 that got repeated every year as a new occurance, but it appears that others have beaten me to it. It should also be pointed out that there was more crime back when I was a kid in the ’70s than there is today. And kidnappings by strangers peaked in the late 1950s, at the height of the Leave It To Beaver period. What has changed since those days is the amount of crime reported in the news. I’ve read that crime in the news has gone up more than 400% since the ’70s. (I can’t vouch for that figure, since I can’t remember where I read it, but it sounds about right.)(I assume that the crime stories are what replaced all the international news that they used to report.)
I wish people around here gave out comic books. I would go trick-or-treating, despite being over forty.
I also wish I were rich enough to give them away like that.
Do you get a discount because you work for Marvel (and whatever other publishers you write for), or do you actually make enough to be able to afford to give away comics. Is your outrageous salary the reason they’re so expensive in the first place? (No offense. I was just wondering.)
Actually, I think he gets a monthly comp box from Marvel. Most of their employees and freelancers (and DC’s) do.
Yeah, I’ll go with paranoia, too.
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When I was a wee lad, we lived, well, not at the bottom of a hill, but as far down the hillside as the roads went. So my trick-or-treat route was up the hill and back on the two different roads that went that way. My mom shadowed me, but that was as far as the protectiveness went (candy was merely inspected to make sure it wasn’t opened, and then I was allowed to proceed with my gluttony). The only year I didn’t get to go out was the year it was raining like crazy, and then she just set up a candy hunt in the house for me.
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Mom was as worried as anyone else who watched America’s Most Wanted about the possibility of child abduction, but she also appreciated a kid’s need to, well, have a childhood.
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As a final coda, I noticed a lot of kids out and about at 2:30-ish in my neighborhood as well. Trick-or-treating by daylight just seems wrong to me somehow.
I’ve noticed way less people out. And just in case people are wondering Halloween at College is weird..though I tend to treat it like a con. Anyway there are way less children out in the area I visited. Apparently in Fairfield children don’t do much trick or treating in the streets they tend to go to “safety streets” or controlled Trick or Treating.. which is a real shame cause I think Halloween is the one holiday where we all get out and see out neighbors. I think it’s sad that Halloween isn’t being celebrated as it used to be.
I haven’t seen any trick-or-treaters in person since 2004. That was at my parents’ old house, just days before they moved. And at their new location, there haven’t been any trick-or-treaters. The first year or two, I went over to hand out candy, same as at the old house. And kids do live in that neighborhood.
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I know in some places kids go trick-or-treating right after school, which doesn’t make much sense those years when Halloween is on a weekday and people would still be at work. Maybe that’s the way it is in my parents’ neighborhood, but I don’t think so.
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Myself, I’ve never seen anyone trick-or-treating in the apartment complexes where I’ve lived. And in one, you could know on anyone’s door; you didn’t have to be buzzed into a building, first.
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Like PAD, I would range far and wide when trick-or-treating, and it would be after dark, too. I don’t ever remember trick-or-treating in the daytime. A Halloween parade? yes. Trick-or-treating while the sun is out? No. Up to a certain age, a parent would be with us, but would wait at the bottom of the driveway while we’d go up to a door ourselves. It’s not as much fun if your Mom or Dad is right next to you, and not even in a costume. It destroys the mystique.
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About 10 years ago, I took two of my cousins trick-or-treating through their neighborhood. And it was after dark, but I wonder if either of them (or anyone in their neighborhood) still goes door-to-door. At 16 and 14, they may not do it any more, but I’d hope there are still kids in their neighborhood who do. I know some communities have Halloween parties for neighborhood kids, which while it has the same end result– candy– doesn’t seem nearly as fun as the experience of going door-to-door.
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I hope my nephew, who lives in the country, is able to go trick-or-treating some place. I’d hate for him to not know the fun of going door-to-door on Halloween.
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I hope these apparent trends toward fewer kids going trick-or-treating is a passing phase and that Halloween as most of us know it isn’t in danger of becoming extinct.
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Like Bill Mulligan, I had woods near me. My friends and I would play there, go on “hikes”, or just explore. All the time. Unfortunately, those woods were razed more than 20 years ago so someone could build a bunch of ugly cookie-cutter condominiums and a 9 hole golf course. But if those woods did still exist, would kids living in my old neighborhood today be allowed (or even encouraged) to explore them? I’d hope so.
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But getting back to Halloween, I have a number of masks I’ve bought over the years, and when I’d go over to my parents to give out candy, I’d bring them along to wear. Now, they just gather dust in the basement.
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By the way, I think my favorite pair of costumes are Willow as Joan of Arc and Oz as God from the Buffy episode “Fear Itself.” Oz’s “costume” was pure genius.
Rick
I always loved that costume too. “She walked with God.”
And here I was wondering if kids these days were tweeting where the really good houses for trick or treating were?
As a side note, news stories report that 2000 or so kids trick or treated the White House, with the Obamas giving out candy. While Michelle wore a cat costume, Barack was in street clothes. Me, I thought he should’ve dressed up in the scariest Halloween costume ever; George W. Bush, complete with facial mask, going “I’m back!”.
First, a confession. Halloween is as big to me and my son as a large stomping thing. Cloverfield monster? Look out–here comes the Scullion Halloween!!
We still range pretty far-although we do it in my sister’s neighborhood. This year her neighbors were both surprised and maybe a little disappointed that my costume was just a vampire cape. Brian asked me to be a vampire once the Ghostbuster/ghost dinosaur combo didn’t come off. I couldn’t find my teeth! Stace made up for it with her SpongeBob costume. Our little party of five kids and six parents tromping through the neighborhood. The only real paranoia for us came when there was a dog–Bri’s a bit of a poochophobe. This year though it was a little odd, people barbecuing at some of the houses in anticipation of the Phillies game(since we live two sneezes out of the city) and giving candy out at the same time.
Luigi, who gives out Tylenol for Halloween? I mean, really?
I gotta go with “much more paranoid”, too. We take Katherine trick-or-treating every year. At the moment we go with her (b/c she is, after all, 5), but once she’s older I doubt we’ll have an issue with her going out solo or with a few friends to trick or treat.
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We only had about half a dozen groups stop by, though, despite the fact that we live in a very kid-heavy neighborhood. Ah, well.
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TWL
Actually, now that I think of it, by the time my son was 10 or so, my wife started bribing him to stay home – she’d buy him a movie or something like that.
He may have gone out once after she died (would’ve been 2002 or later, so he’d have been almost 14 by then). I definitely did not feel an obligation to go with him, if he did :-).
Sean: Luigi, who gives out Tylenol for Halloween? I mean, really?
Luigi Novi: LOL!
I dunno, the CEO of McNeil Consumer Healthcare. 🙂
Maybe JUST a little paranoid, but my ex-wfe got a scare TWICE when we lived in our place in Bay Shore. Once, some smart-aleck thought it would be funny to run up, open our door, and throw in a tin-foil parcel of baked beans that splattered everywhere. Another year before we separated, some mental giant decided to imitate Dane Cook’s “I want to try breaking into a house” routine. (Thanks, Dane. Moron.) They didn’t force the door open, but they cracked the frame around the deadbolt.
We noticed the number of kids coming around decreasing over the last few years, even in groups. Not sure if it’s the kids growing up, fewer families having kids, families moving the heck off Long Island with fewer kid-laden families moving in to replace them… Could be many reasons aside from paranoia. It’s been a while since I saw the old familiar post-Halloween sight of countless eggshells in the streets and trails of shaving cream everywhere from the previous night’s mischief. Not sure if kids today don’t see the point in that, or they’re too lazy to organize such a thing. (Okay, I’m getting crotchety in my old age)
One thing I did notice this year; around my place in Hicksville was a rather large proportion of Jr. High and High School age girls trick or Treating for some reason. It was after a trio of upper-teen girls dressed in Hogwart’s schoolgirl outfits with skirts too high up to even flap in a breeze came around that I decided to stop answering the door for my own mental health.
The world is more dangerous precisely BECAUSE everyone is more paranoid. Just dangerous in a different way.
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Suppose I answer the door to a gaggle of kids wanting candy and I decide to be scary about it. I’d get sued for making some little Ritalin addict cry.
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When I was a kid (I am 40) trick or treating was a full blown quest! All that mattered was that I got home with piles of candy. Each year I vowed revenge on those spoilsports who handed out the plastic spider rings, but there was so much candy that I through said vow out the window once the gluttony commenced.
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I think another factor is that, as a few have mentioned above, more attention is being spent on work, but I think that is because the cost of living has risen steadily while pay has not.
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In my neck of the woods (West Futher Mucking Michigan) trick or treating is rigidly scheduled like baseball, soccer, trumpet, witchcraft, choir, and sit-down-and-shut-up practice. It’s sad. Why are so many of us trying to steal all the kids childhood?
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I really hope that sense becomes common again soon.
Ya know, I still HAVE a couple plastic spider rings. My mother and my wife are right, I am too much the pack rat.
Let me tell you about Halloween here in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Halloween is very much an American holiday and traditionally it was nothing like that in Ireland but they have adopted the dress up and get candy style in recent years. The only problem is they got the schedule very very wrong.
Roughly one week before Halloween Day you get random kids on your bell trick or treating. You have to get your candy and the like way in advance.
I’m American and I’m living over here now and I tell you I want to kick the little kids in their little kid faces and tell them to get back on the 31st like a good kid would. Its very crazy. I like one frantic night all at once in the span of a few hours, not random here and theres over the course of a week.
In my town there is a lot of regulation concerning halloween. We have a set time limit for trick or treating and an age limit. I really don’t care if teenagers trick or treat just as long as they don’t do anything stupid and they dress up (even if they could just go to the store tomorrow and buy their own at half off) but my mom has a fit about it. So, paranoia, yes. Then again my town is right next door to East St. Louis and every year there is at least one horde of East St. Louis kids who come up here to get candy (which is sad if you think about it, they don’t do anything bad they’re just a bit ill-cultured).
This year, there was a lot of parties going on so I don’t think there were many kids out. I know the urchins down the street were out of town–they’re the only kids on our street. I don’t remember nearly as many safe city run or school run halloween parties or trick or treating areas when I was little as there are now. It was a challenge when I was little to go to as many houses as you possibly could, we never did because my mom didn’t want to. But we never threw out the candy after 3 days like some people do–we just threw out the gross peanut butter flavored things. I don’t remember getting any apples or popcorn balls. We got pennies and pencils I think.
The neighborhood is also changing–we’re all getting old. Despite this there were about a good 10-12 kids including the ESL kids.
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We got rained out and I had to work. Ian got to run around in an silly outfit for the benefit of grandparents though and we still may not be able to pry the thing off of him come this time next week.
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My wife is really giving me grief as well since, as much as she works to shelter Ian from my more interesting movies and books, Ian took to all things Halloween like a fish takes to water. I think Halloween was his fastest ever learned word and he was very vocal about wanting to see the Halloween episodes of his favorite Nick Jr shows. Oh, and it seems that the Peanuts Halloween special made him a Snoopy fan in a way that no other Peanuts cartoon had yet to do.
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Oh, and Jenn threatened to hurt me since Ian was very… insistent… that mommy put my Gore de Vol Legacy DVDs on the TV when daddy was at work. Yes, he’s become a Gore fan. I’m so proud.
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As to the larger topic at hand…
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I think it’s a 50/50 thing. Yeah, more people are way more paranoid these days because there are way more things out there making them paranoid. And I’m not talking about real threats here. I’m talking about modern technology making the dumb even dumber.
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You always used to hear about bad things happening to children somewhere, but these days you get 24/7 national coverage of stories involving abductions and missing children or bad things happening out there. You can have a child go missing in some small, out of the way town in the Midwest and the entire nation may be seeing the story play out for the better part of a week on the network news and by the talking heads on all of the cable channels. And that’s often followed up by the talking heads in the media debating the merits of some new law or regulation that’s being proposed by legislators while talking up how many predators are out there after “our children” and how it’s so much more dangerous than ever to be a child in this country.
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Hyperbole = ratings and hyperbole is what we often get.
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Then there’s the email factor. God knows what it is, but there’s just something about email that makes most of the population drop a few IQ points whenever they log in to their accounts to take a look at their inbox. It seems like a lot of people who wouldn’t believe an outlandish claim from a stranger will believe just about any chain email that hits their inbox. And one of the regular email hoaxes (after political sliming and bogus claims of free stuff for forwarding an email to 50 other people) seems to be abducted/missing children emails or the ones about a dangerous threat that really did happen because the original email writer swears it did and it could happen to your children too type of hoaxes. Snopes has a nice sized collection of those.
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So, as with the news, people are suddenly getting a lot more “news” about bad things happening to children even when the bad things and the children are fictional. And every year a new batch of those dámņëd email warnings pop up as Halloween gets closer.
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I’m sure the that people used to believe the number of child abductions in America was greater than it actually was, but I’ve seen studies in the last few years showing (amongst other things) that the average American believes that the number of children abducted each year Vs how many actually are is way off and way overinflated. I’ve also seen a lot of once regional style tall tales getting play everywhere thanks to the disinformation superhighway.
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It seems like a lot more people think that it was a lot better and safer in the old days than it was and think that it’s way worse than it really is today. Or that could just be my experiences with people.
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On the flip side I think that things can be more dangerous depending on where you’re at. In some places you have more and more people being crammed into smaller areas and that likely does increase your odds of running across the local nutjob. It also looks as though some areas have gotten a lot more population dense in and around the higher crime areas where drugs are sold and violent crimes take place.
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I freely admit that, when looking at it from a national level, I could be wrong, but that’s what it looks like around here.
I think one of the main reasons people so horribly overestimate the number of child abductions is because of the activists. (Activists of all sorts are responsible for a lot of disinformation, actually.) The various activist groups concerned with child abductions run many ads mentioning X-number of children reported missing each year, and then those numbers are repeated often on the news.
But you’ll notice it’s always the number REPORTED missing. That means all the kids who were late coming home for dinner, whose parents reported them, and all those runaways, including those who only run away for a day or two. There are some parents who report their children missing several times a year. And each time gets counted in those statistics. There are also prank reports that are sometimes counted.
And of course, the overwhelming majority of kids who really do disappear are teenage runaways, and most of the rest are taken by relatives in custody battles.
The number actually kidnapped by strangers is very small in comparison.
According to “News of the Weird”, the year that had the single largest number of disappearances of children was the year that the IRS started requiring proof that children claimed as dependents actually existed. Make of that what you will. 🙂
Mr. David, I’m afraid that both of your questions get a “yes” answer. Are people way more paranoid? Oh yes. Is the world that much more dangerous? Definitely yes. Unfortunately, the old saying was never truer; “Just because your paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.”
I should expect a Nov 1. headline from the Daily Bugle at some point; “Halloween: Threat or Menace? Spider-Man to blame!” (Well, the Spider-Man part is probably a little facetious, but honestly – if it’s the Daily Bugle, don’t you expect it to blame Spidey?)
I remain,
Sincerely,
Eric L. Sofer
x<]:o){
The Bad Clown…
This is how I got started collecting comics. Halloween 1968, one house was giving away coverless vendor return comics they’d “obtained” (don’t ask how) from the local magazine distributor. I got the 1968 Justice League 80 page Giant, featuring reprints of the induction of Green Arrow, Atom and Hawkman into the JLA.
Still have it.
Well, this year not only did I not have any trick-or-treaters (though where I live isn’t really conducive to them), but neither did my parents, two coworkers and a friend who lives out of state– all of whom live in residential neighborhoods. Haven’t heard yet from two of my cousins.
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On the other hand, my parents’ former next door neighbor tells me he had a very good turn out. More than 80 kids, by his estimate.
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As to times being more paranoid now, we had reason to be paranoid between 1975 and 1977 when the Oakland County child killer was on the loose. He (or they, as the case may be; the murders remain unsolved) abducted and killed four kids during that period. But I don’t recall there being any talk of not letting kids go trick-or-treating. Now I’m sure there were probably more parents accompanying the kids than in other years, but they probably waited at the bottom of the driveways (except maybe those with really young kids who might’ve been nervous going up to someone’s house under any circumstances).
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Or maybe there weren’t more parents tagging along. My Dad tells me that as best as he can remember neither he nor my Mom tagged along during those years. He’s pretty sure that it was largely because we went trick-or-treating with a group of friends. He also said we were probably restricted to our own subdivision; but that may have been in large part because we’d have had to cross a more or less major street (just two lanes, but a 40 MPH speed limit and no traffic lights) to get to other subdivisions.
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And it may have been that since we had a neighborhood association, most everyone knew each other to some degree or other, and so felt our neighborhood was safe. However, I suspect that if that major street wasn’t there (or if there had been a traffic light), us older kids would have been able to visit the nearby subdivisions, too. After all, a lot of kids from school lived in those subdivisions, so presumably our respective parents would have known each other, too.
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While it’s a bit unfortunate that trick-or-treating has fallen by the wayside in some neighborhoods, it’s good to know that kids still go trick-or-treating in the old subdivision. And in such apparently large numbers. It’s nice that it isn’t completely a thing of the past.
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Rick
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Crime/2009/11/02/11602596-sun.html
The fact that it’s only two instances may turn out to be hoaxes.
Still it’s a good idea to be careful.
I think actually political correctness is the biggest danger.
At my nephew’s school Halloween is known as Orange and Black day.
I do not get that at all. Halloween isn’t Christian yet it’s lumped in with winter holidays etc..
I am going to butcher the original quote… but, ” Justice must not only be served, it must be seen as being served.” and that is what is lacking. No trust in the justice/crime system.
Unwarranted or not.
When we moved to Savannah, we encountered something called “Trunk or Treat” for the first time. We learned that it’s an event, typically at a church, where people gather in the parking lot and dole out candy from the trunks of their cars. The idea is that it gives the kids a safe, well-lit place to load up on candy. Some of the churches have fall festivals or other activities for the kids, too (not to mention a sales pitch to the adults, no doubt). These events seem to take a lot of the traffic off the streets on Halloween. This was our 5th Halloween here, and we didn’t have any trick or treaters. I think the most we’ve had in any given year was a half dozen.
My original plan was to give out candy to trick-or-treaters for an hour or maybe 90 minutes and then head over to the weekly old-car cruise night for the rest (which was also supposed to have trick-or-treating for any kids who came).
It rained, as it has for the last three Saturday nights (I took a four-day weekend last week and the sun never came out the whole time). Just a light drizzle (I call it “spitting”–something’s falling, but you have to actually be out in it to be sure), but that was probably enough to keep most people’s cars home.
The rain didn’t stop the kids, though. The first ones showed up shortly before six and the last at about 8:40. I’d say the oldest were maybe twelve or thirteen, most were under ten. Many were shy toddlers. I gave out an entire bag of snack-size Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, most of a bag of “fun-size” Nestle Crunch bars and most of a huge variety bag of snack-size Kit Kats. Everyone seemed to have at least made an effort to have a real costume and nobody was obnoxious.
I think it’s nice that store-bought costumes seem to have improved a lot in recent years. Remember those ridiculous things from the ’70s and ’80s where the costume consisted of a plastic mask of the character along with flame-retardant super-lightweight pants and short-sleeve shirt with a picture of the character printed on the chest? Haven’t seen one of those in a while.
Last year, we got 3 kids.
This year, we moved 10 miles down the road, to a house development rather than a townhouse development.
At somewhere around the hundredth kid, we had to switch from giving out candy and a comic to candy or a comic. At somewhere around 150, I had to close down for a while to make a candy run. Didn’t get many more after that, but I’ll try to be prepared for a couple hundred next year (particularly once word gets out that we’re the folks with the comic books.)
Peter David: Is the world really that much more dangerous? Or is everyone just way more paranoid?
How about neither? I think people are just much more aware of the world. I teach Sociology, and I tell my students that some of the whack job stuff that is going on now was going on 50 years ago – you just never heard about it. The guy who locked up his daughter and had 12 kids with her? That stuff has happened before, but last century it would have just turned up as a wildly distorted urban legend…now it’s on CNN and Yahoo! News.
I steal a line from an old ish of Excalibur – “in seeing everything, nothing is seen”. By having the ability of having news 24 hours a day, people know just about everything that’s going on. Breaking news used to be stuff that was within 4-12 hours; now it’s within 10 minutes. The most depraved of stories are splayed across our televisions and computer screens, so now people think…it can happen to them.
Which means, by default, in order to know more, people need to peer into the inner workings of others, to look behind the curtain and see what ‘people are’ when they close their doors. Thus, the booming popularity of ‘reality television’…a chance to figure out how crazy others really are.
In an efficient gesellschaft-style society, some of the things we took for granted 50 years ago (like knowing your neighbors) aren’t really necessary (who cares)? People fret about ‘not knowing their neighbors’ out of some sense of security (If I know them, they won’t abduct my kids). I’d argue the reason to know your neighbors is because you share space, and frankly, just knowing your neighbors never really hurt (unless you live in a Stephen King novel).
So, I think the world’s no more dangerous than it was. More crowded, less polite in some ways, but faster, and more ‘aware’….
Putting in my two cents…for years I’ve been thinking Halloween has been going down-hill as far as trick-or-treating goes. I know I have not seen any indication that almost anybody puts in the heavy four or five hours that I did as a kid.
Until this year.
Here in my part of Orlando, there were kids everywhere. All kinds of costumes, hundreds of people on the streets. I would have loved it … if they weren’t dumb as rocks!
Can anybody explain to me why, in a neighborhood with sidewalks everywhere, about 60% of these idiots insist on walking around in the middle of the street? I’m not talking about just not paying attention while *crossing* the street, which would be bad enough, but full-blown 60% of the idiots walking in the streets, barely moving out of the way of cars.
So in this area, people don’t seem to be more skittish, nervous, or protective than they used to … they just all seem to have a death wish.
Any recommendations of a more intelligent place to move?