Trick Or Treating

The Halloween decorations outside are appearing more frequently now, and even with my sore back I put some out the other day. I have some "monsters and ghosts hanging from my two big trees in the front yard, others hanging from smaller trees in the yard and near the door entrance, some spooky decorations in the garden, pumpkins at the door, signs in the yard etc..I have to get jane to put the spider webs on the mailbox and near the door. And I haven't put up the big Frankenstein figure yet.
All my inside decorations are in boxes underneath a stairwell, where I can not reach them due to my injured back. If I can get lazy Jane to move all of that I will decorate the inside of the house too. Decorating this way is uplifting for me. It makes one feel like a child does during the holidays- excited and invested in the holiday. I find that adults who participate that way in Halloween and other holidays are usually the ones with a more optimistic, fun outlook on life. Jane is too old for trick or treat now, but I am not too old to enjoy handing out candy to the kids wo ho come to the door for goodies. I enjoy the costumes, the excitement of the kids, scaring a few of them (mildly) with a mask or boo. People who love kids usually love Halloween. My dad was as big a fan of Halloween as the kids he gave the candy too. I can remember when I was tiny and in my ghost costume (My mom would make one from an old white bed sheet) my dad seemed to be more excited about trick or treating than did I.
The custom of 'trick or treat' probably has several origins. Most of them are Irish. An old Irish peasant practice called for going door to door to collect money, bread cake, cheese, eggs, butter, nuts, apples, etc., in preparation for the festival of St. Columbus Kill may have given modern people the idea for today's trick or treating.. Yet another custom was the begging for soul cakes, or offerings for one's self - particularly in exchange for promises of prosperity or protection against bad luck. It is with this custom the concept of the fairies came to be incorporated as people used to go door to door begging for treats. Failure to supply the treats would usually result in practical jokes being visited on the owner of the house. And....teenagers today have taken up the custom of playing those tricks.
Modern trick or treating (primarily children going door-to-door, begging for candy) began fairly recently in the US, as a blend of several ancient and modern influences. In 19th Century America, rural immigrants from Ireland and Scotland kept Halloween customs from their homelands. The girls stayed indoors and did divination games, while the boys roamed outdoors engaging in almost equally ritualized pranks, which their elders "blamed" on the spirits being abroad that night.
Halloween trick or treating as we know it now can probably traced back in mid-19th Century New York, where children called "ragamuffins" would dress in costumes and beg for pennies from adults on Thanksgiving Day. Things got nastier with increased urbanization and poverty in the 1930's. Adults began casting about for ways to control the previously harmless but now increasingly expensive and dangerous vandalism of the "boys." Towns and cities began organizing "safe" Halloween events and householders began giving out bribes to the neighborhood kids as a way to distract them away from their previous anarchy. The ragamuffins disappeared or switched their date to Halloween. But Paris Hilton still lives on. Hehe (I wonder if Paris has to costume at Halloween, or is she really always in costume?).
So all this trick or treat activity we have here and in many other countries is recent, from the 1930's. I like it. The excitement of small children trick or treating at Halloween is something we remember even in our adult age, one of those fond and endearing passages of right of childhood. Those who don't get it must be the monsters we all run from 365 days a year. Happy Trick or Treat this year.