The past couple of years, the amount of kids out on Halloween has dwindled down in my neighborhood. This year, my wife and I were at her cousin’s house and we saw maybe a couple of kids walking around. My wife blames people going to Trunk or Treat things. We both work in retail, so we see more of the public, and nobody was in costume. What was everybody’s experience with Halloween this year?
Trunk or treats and parents being afraid of the devil are to blame. Most parents won’t even let their kids ride the bus these days let alone go to a strangers. The msm has parents constantly afraid that satan will abduct their kid. So yeah things trunk or treat in church parking lot evolved and killed normal trick or treat
Yeah.
I “blame” popular neighborhoods. Used to be you went around your neighborhood or went with a friend in town if you were more rural or something.
Now there are “it” neighborhoods or even small towns that seem to attract large groups, it’s almost like a block party. Tons of people arrive, there’s wild and extreme halloween decorations, effort gets put into costumes, and sometimes even full-size candy bars. My kids started going to popular areas with friends, one friend lives in a neighborhood like that so everyone uses his house as a starting point. It’s cool, but unfortunately large gatherings tend to bring assholes, too, and now there’s a cop nearby on standby because some people have to be dipshits and start being destructive or try to start fights.
We barely handed out one bag of candy in our neighborhood, last year we went through two big ones.
There’s definitely something to this popular neighborhoods theory.
As an anecdote from my dense urban area, there’s a stretch of a few residential blocks that have become the most popular spot within walking distance of my home, and it’s largely due to the trick or treating “geography” of the area: horizontal density of lots of participating homes per block, wide sidewalks, single lane roads with lots of stop signs and crosswalks (inconvenient for through traffic).
The blocks with major stroads get avoided for pedestrian safety reasons, and the blocks with big apartment buildings or commercial storefronts get avoided because there’s not a lot of trick or treating available.
So it creates hot spots, which feed back onto themselves as the residents of those hot blocks lean more heavily into decorations and candy and costumes the next year.
And what I’m describing is kinda a micro sized distribution of this phenomenon, where the hotspots are only maybe a 2x2 grid of city blocks, next to completely dead zones of 2x2 city blocks. I imagine in a suburban area that clustering effect can intensify, especially if everyone is driving.
It was bonkers this year!
In excess of 650 candy given out, though not my usual Famous Amos packs (wildly more expensive than last year). A solid wall of kids and families from 7-8:30 when we ran out.
I do go crazy for decorating and candy delivery mechanism.
We also did a record amount of candy this year. Nice weather for it.
Edit: I would say we did between 350 and 400 pieces, 2 per kid. My neighborhood started at 5 ish and I turned out the lights at 8.
Had 1 visit, normally 5 or so.
But actually its pretty nice. I dont like these commercial days where its all about buying shit like costumes and candy.
Maybe we should donate that money to some organisation instead of getting fat and ugly eating candy.
We normally have kids up until 11 pm, this year we had less then normal, and only 3 after 10 pm. We live on a main street, and are the known Halloween house with the way we decorate. We probably had 1/3 less this year. We attribute it to the trunk or treats. Our next door neighbor took his kids trunk or treating 6 times in the past week. Safer? Maybe. Lazier? Very much so.
We had zero this year. We even put out decorations and every year we give out full size bars and pokemon packs. Live in the center of town in a dense neighborhood. I do think part of the reason is none of the street lights ever are on anymore
Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet, but Trunk or Treat for lazy and/or helicopter parents has cannibalized door to door visits.
No one this year because of a stupid baseball game and suddenly everyone cares about baseball because go local team. Canada is supposed to be “elbows out” but we throw money at US team sports that over schedule.
Hey but the Leafs won last night.
Depending on your neighborhood and how long you’ve lived there, you’ll see ebb and flow overtime. Families age out but stay in the neighborhood. My neighborhood actually saw an uptick for the first time since before COVID. We had some old families move out and replaced with just a few families with kids.
Fewer kids on the street, they’ve outgrown the trick-or-treating phase. And with how expensive it is to own a property now, I don’t expect young couples to buy a house here anytime soon.
My neighborhood has kids living in single-family homes, but they all go trunk-or-treating. It’s extremely disappointing.
We had a wind/rain storm. Did our block and got home soaked. Not as bumping as last year. So I don’t think it’s dead, just a bad weather year.
No kids Trick-of-Treating showed up at my door yesterday, but holy shit it was loud outside. People (adults) were lining up stretching around the block to get into some event, I guess, in an adjacent building. Lots of yelling / very loud talking, honking, etc. Bunch of police sirens at like 3am or so. Some Friday nights are kind of like that normally around here, but this one was extra rowdy.
Downtown area of a city on the US West Coast.
We had a coven of witches sitting around a campfire next door!
Lots of kids in the neighborhoods across town wherre the families now live. In the part of town where I am where it is all rental units filed with childless professionals and retirement homes for affluent snowbirds, there was no trick-or-treating. My husband grew up here and in this part of town it used to be crawling with kids in the 60’s and 70’s. Then again, that was before rich people “discovered” our city and snapped up all the affordable rentals and converted them to luxury condos.
Definitely a lot quieter here as well - we live in a neighborhood in a rural town. Not many options to go trick or treating here. We did get maybe 40-50 kids last night, but in past years (definitely before Covid), it was more like a few hundred. People would drive their kids from the area here and let them loose. We had to have the cops drive around the neighborhood to make sure everyone was safe. Definitely different last night. Still lots of little kids, but very few teens. Used to be the other way around. We have lots of candy left …
