I hope everyone is having a happy Halloween! We are wrapping up our first Halloween in our new city and we've encountered some odd trick-or-treating behavior. Does anyone else live where a large percentage of the kids don't knock on the door? They walk onto the porch and say 'trick-or-treat.' Which I really couldn't hear through the door past the living room and into the kitchen where I was working on dinner... because trick-or-treaters come while it's time to make dinner. I don't mind stopping and handing out candy, I just don't know how many kids I may have missed because there was no knocking involved. Sometimes I would check because I heard a suspicious noise and often there would be no one there and once a bunch of kids were almost off the steps heading to the next house and the grown up called them back explaining that the the door is open now... I then made a sign for the front door to aide in communication.
This increased the knocking, mostly, but things still seemed odd. I remember trick-or-treating following a reliable protocol: knock-- door opens-- 'trick-or-treat'-- get candy (while the resident would say their comments i.e. Happy Halloween, or Brush Your Teeth)-- then we say 'thank you' and move on. To be honest when I was young enough to require a parent I remember we had the rule that we were only allowed to go to the houses of people we knew... which weren't that many in walking distance. But I digress. Here even with the help of the sign it went more like: knock-- 'trick-or-treat' -- door opens-- they stare at me-- I give them candy and wish them a good night-- they were pretty good at saying 'thank you'. Just kind of odd to me and I wonder if this is normal other places and I'm the odd one.
Other things I noticed included the practice of trick-or-treating for the absent or infantile, using a backpack as a collection vessel, and I noticed several of the neighbors (three I could see without leaving the front door) would hang out in their yard to distribute the candy. The last one makes a certain amount of sense if there's a rush or if you have a member of the family designated for that job-- but it never seemed quite that busy and I was trying to multitask. We had around 75 trick-or-treaters over a 2 1/2-3 hour evening. All in all it was fun. Yay Halloween. And yay for not having too much candy left over.
