Sitting here with my morning coffee thinking about years past of my own and then children's TRICK OR TREAT DAY.
I wrote about my Halloween in the "Good Morning" thread. http://www.seniorsonly.club/threads/the-good-morning-thread.731/page-428
Times change so much when I was young it was fun to take that old sheet cut two holes in it and go out trick or treating. Then came the person who put needles in the apples so they stopped putting out apples and the candy apples was such a treat. The hospital offered to x-ray the fruit for anyone who wanted Then came the poison in candy and you could not take any home made candy. All of this was do to the media making a big deal out of it. After the media talked about the copycats started. If they did not make such a big deal I think the police could have tracked down that original person and ended it.
Actually, All Saints Day and Halloween have no connection with the way it is celebrated nowdays, and it is another example of the church Christian holy days getting deliberately mixed in with pagan celebrations. All Saints Day is the first day of November, and it is a traditional Catholic holy day, properly celebrated as that by many religious denominations all over the world. As the evening before All Saints Day, the last night before it is called “Hallowed Evening”, just like we say “Christmas Eve” for the night before Christmas Day. At the same time, pagan traditions have their demonic celebration of Samhain , which is where the witches, ghosts and goblins come from. When early Christian missionaries tried to change the pagan traditions to conform with religious ones, sometimes the result was a garbled version of the two conflicting celebrations, just like happens at Christmas and Easter. My mother-in-law from my first marriage, who came here as a war bride from England, had never even heard of halloween, and when her kids came home with bags of candy, she thought they had stolen it and was horrified. Trying to explain to their mother that all of the kids went around to people’s houses and received candy,sounded like the most ridiculous fabrication ever, to their proper British mother; so of course, the boys lost their candy and were punished for lying. Eventually, she learned about halloween and trick-or-treating, but I don’t think she ever liked the idea of it. An interesting page explaining about the tradition of halloween. http://www.av1611.org/halloween.html
It’s over. We only had 2 people walk up the driveway but I was sitting on the porch and nicely informed them that we do not do Halloween. They appeared to be as tall as myself so either they were kids walking on stilts or they were young adults. Since it’s pretty unsafe for little kids (even on stilts) to be walking around my neighborhood after dark, I believe they were past the age of Trick or Treating anyway. I still continued to sit on my porch and watched a movie on my IPad and awaited an eventual “trick” which did not happen.
We had no Trick-or-Treaters last night. We prepared for a few since there are some kids in the houses down the road and some who live across the lake, but none showed up. It is almost always cold and very dark here for Halloween, and there have never been many children in our area, so I think we have had two "beggars" here in the twenty six years we have lived in this house.
@Ken Anderson At least you can be reasonably sure there are no needles, poisons, adulterants, or drugs in the candy....... But, ya still could get a belly-ache! Frank
Or, as I did when I was about 4 years old, go to bed whilst chewing a blob of “double bubble gum” and wake up with it glued to your hair.
Halloween celebration is a relatively new thing here in UK, maybe grown gradually over the last 20/30 years gets bigger each year. I was in New England in September and the displays of pumpkins everywhere were beautiful.