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.
5 comments:
Does your doorbell work? Maybe they were pushing it?
Hi Andrea, there is no door bell... wishing I had one though
This year Merritt and I went to a movie on Halloween night. We get very few trick-or-treaters. I have two Halloween decorations. A skeleton in a cage that "dances" when there it motion close by and a clay pumpkin that I can put a candle in. We put a bowl of candle in a chair by the front door with my decorations in the window by the door. I figured we'd probably have about 5 trick-or-treaters. When we came home I checked the bowl - yep, about 5 pieces seemed to have been taken. When I told Merritt he let me know that he'd taken about that much before we left - so could be zero for our home this year. I do think it's odd that you had people come to your door and expect you to be able to sense that they were there. Good signage - maybe they couldn't all read?
Okay, not a bowl of candle but a bowl of candy - actually good candy - 3 Musketeers, Snickers, Milky Way, Twix...
ah, you put out the good candy too-- which I guess if you're going to end up with it then at least it's good! Yeah, we didn't have any decorations up but I did have the porch light on and the storm door propped open. I didn't make the sign until I realized there was a problem (I thought knocking was a given in the trick or treat tradition). The little ones had a grown up with them. I'm glad I'll have the sign for next year and I'm glad I had the 'sckullphabet' font on my computer.
-- I would like to see your dancing skeleton :)
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