Trick or Treat

For children, especially American children, Halloween is an opportunity to dress up in masks and elaborate costumes with ugly hair, eyebrows, big smelly feet, and long dirty fingernails – all the things, in fact, that we prevent them doing throughout the year! They then walk around their neighbourhoods - more often than not with adult supervision these days, when stranger danger is a constant fear - knock on doors and are greeted by people who pretend to be scared of these hideous visitors and fill the children's bags with chocolate, sweets and other goodies.

This behaviour actually dates back to the oldest pre-Christian traditions, when strange visitors on Halloween, or Samhain, as it was originally called, were considered to be the ghosts of the dead. They were offered food, ale and small gifts to encourage them to go away and not trouble the living for another year. One favourite custom was to bake them a cake with dried fruit, nuts or seeds in, because it was believed they had to count each nut or fruit and this would take them the whole night, by which time they were banished to the land of ghosts for another year. From this comes the ‘trick or treat’ aspect of the custom, spirits who were not rewarded with a treat would plague the family for the next twelve months.

Strangely enough, in the USA, trick or treating is falling out of favour, making due to new urban legends that include razor blades being hidden in apples and sweets laced with hallucinogenic drugs, which, although they have little or no foundation in truth, cause many parents to think twice before allowing their children to knock on the doors of any but well known and trusted neighbours.

Trick or Treat

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