What Halloween's Become

What happened to Halloween? For the past few years we have lived outside suburbia in the farm country - we had chickens, our neighbors had cattle. So it seemed natural to me that on Halloween we only got one trick-or-treater. Our kids, after hitting the 4 houses on our hill, were driven to the neighborhood in town where they did their trick-or-treating. Somewhat opportunistically, I've always tried to make sure they had a "typical" Halloween experience. When we lived in Nebraska, Knoxville, and California this only involved sending them out the door to trick-or-treat around the neighborhood. This summer we moved back to suburbia (Brentwood) and I thought, not unreasonably, that the dozens of kids that I see at the bus stops on our street every morning would be knocking on our door last night. In preparation I purchased a dozen bags of candy at the grocery store to ensure we didn't run out! I would finally get to meet the neighborhood kids that haven't come to play at our house yet. We would see their costumes and learn what the trends were in character favorites. On the flip side my kids would get to meet the majority of our neighbors, learning the adults faces and making themselves known as well. Halloween is really something of a communitywide darśan, excepting the masked of course. It is a great American tradition like barbeques and fairs that brings a place together and allows neighbors who wouldn't otherwise associate to commingle. Ten years ago, the week before we bought our house in Knoxville, we spent Halloween in that neighborhood to see if it was a good place to raise our kids. But last night we didn't have a single trick-or-treater. Not one. Yesterday afternoon we heard tale after tale of where our kids' friends were being driven to trick-or-treat. Our kids still went around our neighborhood. They met the neighbors, remembered (mostly) to say thank-you, and brought home a ton of candy. But they were the only ones. The fact that so many people still had candy to pass out and festooned their houses for the holiday leads one to believe that the paucity of trick-or-treaters here is a recent phenomenon, but I don't really know. Still I wonder what has happened to this community-building event. Has Halloween really become so commoditized that ALL the parents look to maximize their kids take and thus only hit the premium neighborhoods? I am almost wont to sympathize with the churchgoers who hold "Hallelujah Eve" events to bring their synthesized community together and lambast the heathens and devil-worshippers who are just out to maximize their candy take. Almost. My wife Cara has already started scheming with another neighborhood mother of ways to bring the kids back into the neighborhood next year. Perhaps a costume parade in the afternoon - after school but before dark - will bring the neighbors out to see eachother. In that seeing there may even grow a familiarity sufficient to warrant letting their kids romp around the neighborhood with the kids they usually romp around the neighborhood with and meet all the neighbors. I envy you, the future reader, who can merely click to the next year's blog to find the result of such an experiment.