Hallowed Be Thy Haul
When I was at the peak of my ‘Trick or Treat’ powers, primarily the grade school years, neighborhoods far and wide opened up like candy dispensaries.
It wasn’t just a particular street or area that opened up its doors but every street and nearly every door. As long as you could keep walking was how much bounty you came home with and we didn’t use conventional bags or those plastic pumpkins because that limited the size and poundage of what we could carry. Instead, the large-scale operators like myself used pillow cases. By the end of the evening, if you did your job properly, you looked more like a candy hoarding Santa Clause with a full pillow case tossed over the shoulder.
There was something so communal about the event, so many children out there with one common goal, that no one was really alone and although the youngest children still had a parent on hand, this was primarily a no-parent function where everyone watched over everybody else. Potential perpetrators, if there were any lurking, were relegated to the sidelines due to excessive foot traffic.
My friends and I used to do a geographical sweep that always involved note comparison. The protocol for running into another group of kids was an exchange of information about areas they had been in which you had not and vice versa. What were they giving out? What house had the best stuff? Was it possible to go back twice? What houses to avoid and what was just a waste of time. You ran into so many children that it was like having an advanced social networking reconnaissance.
Unlike today’s TOT environment, the most sought after and heavily traded information had to do with treats that were made by homeowners; things like popcorn balls and candy apples. The folks that usually made these things knew their craft and loved what they were doing. They’d make the stuff from scratch and the treats were, by and large, fantastic. Treats like this were coveted because any kid could walk into a store and buy a candy bar but homemade fare was a random Halloween delicacy largely unavailable but for one day a year and you had to canvas a neighborhood to find it.
I don’t remember exactly when the homemade Halloween food scare took hold but it shut down a valuable mom and pop industry that had thrived for a very long time. Exposed as an urban myth (with no documented evidence to the contrary), the ‘razor blade in the apple’ story not only stopped the flow of candy apples but, for a period of time, it virtually put a halt to the tradition of Halloween, proving once again that we are a very skittish and hyper-reactive people.
But back when I was walking the streets (should I rephrase that?), that bag got heavier and heavier and eventually dictated how long you stayed in the game before the strain on your shoulder forced you home. Having a bag full of candy that was three times the size of your head was a much sought after accomplishment, so most of the time we suffered for our diligence.
When you finally lugged that sack of sugar into your house it was like hitting the finish line in the Boston Marathon but, unlike the Marathon, the exercise was incomplete until you dumped out everything onto the floor and took inventory. It wasn’t uncommon to have an inordinate amount of Smarties but, then again, that’s hardly the worst thing that can happen to you. Chocolate was the goal though, and you needed plenty of chocolate to call the evening a success, but what put you in the upper echelon of TOTers was the ‘homemade’ tally…lovingly referred to on our block as the ‘good crap’.
After inventory there was the customary trading portion of the event and the living room floor became the New York Stock Exchange and you might either enhance or downgrade your initial investment. In the end, though, it was win, win all around because you’d had a great night of bumping into friends, getting exorcise, half-freezing your ass off, unraveling the great neighborhood treasure map and coming home with enough candy to kill 50 kids.
It’s a shame what happened to Halloween. It was a magnificent piece of childhood entertainment, screwed up by malcontents, weirdos and wild rumor, never to be experienced the same way again. Even though it has made a modest comeback in recent years, it’s just not the same kinetic experience that had us looking forward to the night like it was Christmas Eve. Trust has leaked out of our society and parents are assuming that there are hordes of evil beings just waiting to scoop up their offspring. Beyond that, there’s an actual theory that suggests just walking around in a costume, especially a mask, increases the risk of falling down and premature death by as much as 4 times. Maybe they’re right and the scaled down version of Halloween was necessary because we live in more dangerous times, or kids are clumsier, I don’t know.
Whatever happened though, it’s a shame that children can’t experience the night with the same wild abandon that we did, in neighborhoods that looked like New York City streets at rush hour, because that was some awesome, cool, shit.