A Partial History Of Trick Or Treating, Mutual Need, Compulsory Kindness, And The Immortal Full-Size Candy Bar House
* Our baby is here! Her name is Margaret Héloïse Lizer, she was born just after midnight on September 21, and she’s the best baby. There will surely be many Tiny Letters about her in the future, but this one is about Halloween, of course.*
Everyone remembers their neighborhood’s full-size candy bar house. After moving away from Los Angeles in 1996 and living many other places, I’m back within walking distance of ours, a large white house that seemed a mansion to me then, tucked up in the Glendale foothills. I can still picture warm yellow light spilling out of the front door, the top of the owner’s head bent low over a plastic cauldron full of Snickers and Butterfingers. Of course, a handful of fun-size candies equals a full-size candy bar in volume, but it has nothing on the sheer wild thrill of a whole, entire, grocery store checkout lane candy bar for a child. To give me—a perfect stranger!—a whole, entire candy bar was the wildest, most extravagant act of generosity I could imagine.
I’ve talked about this with a lot of people, and almost all of them remember their own full-size candy bar house. (My friend Peter’s full-size candy bar house was Henry Winkler’s.) It goes without saying that mine is now the neighborhood’s full-size candy bar house. For the cost of about 60 cents* per child, I will achieve immortality.
Many people make charitable donations during the winter holidays, and gift-giving to friends and relatives is part of many holidays, but Halloween is the only modern American holiday where handing out treats to perfect strangers is a fundamental part of the celebration itself. And yet, unlike charitable donations or (hopefully) family gift-exchanges, this generosity comes with an undercurrent of threat: give me candy or I’ll smash your pumpkins, t.p. your house, knock down your fences and break down your doors.
There are many examples throughout the world of what anthropologists label “ritual begging,” or “masked ritual solicitation.” In his paper “Trick or Treat: Pre-Texts and Contexts,” folklorist and anthropologist Tad Tuleja lists “the Christmas guisers of southern Poland, the traditional ‘false-face’ beggars of the Swiss Alps, German soul cakers, the schnorers of Central European Jewish tradition, British mummers and hobby horse impersonators, Irish straw boys and native American rituals,” to name only a few.
Soul-caking, an early precursor of trick or treating, is one of the earliest documented Halloween activities, discussed in a 1511 festival book, an illustrated pamphlet produced to commemorate a holiday or large public event. In soul-caking, groups of children would go around to their neighbors chanting rhymes and begging for snacks, coins, or other small tokens, chiefly soul cakes, “small round seedcakes made with spices and with currants on top.” Sometimes they were accompanied by adults who followed along playing musical instruments, sometimes in costume. Sometimes the soulers carried with them a “hobby horse,” “consisting of a real horse’s skill mounted atop a staff and carried by a man draped in a sheet or skin.”
Take a minute and really let that sink in.
There were many other antecedents to American trick or treating. In New York, Thanksgiving had been celebrated in the 19th century by boys going door to door demanding treats and money for fireworks, combining colonial Guy Fawkes celebrations with dressing up as Thanksgiving “Indians.” Meanwhile, the German Christmas custom of “belsnickling” was popular on the east coast and in Canada, where groups of costumed children would go door to door and anyone who couldn’t identify them was asked to pay with a treat.** In every case, ritualized begging came with the explicit or implied threat that the ungenerous would have their homes vandalized or worse. Outrageous costumes were intended as much to frighten homeowners as to scare away spirits.
Ritualized begging reenacts the give-and-take relationship between children and adults, between the rich and the poor. It is fundamentally coercive on both sides, simmering with the threat of anarchic violence. Like carnival days, ritualized begging Is essentially conservative, overturning the order of things one night a year as a way of reasserting the naturalness of that order for the other 364. This one-night-only inversion of the haves and the have-nots releases social tensions in a way that costs the dominant classes little more than the price of a cauldron full of candy.
The important thing about ritualized begging is that it is neither spontaneous nor voluntary. After all, there is nothing preventing you from handing out full-size candy bars to children all year long (save perhaps the anger of their parents). But on Halloween night, children dressed as ghouls come to your door and demand you give them candy or else.
Trick or treating in the United States began as a way to maintain social order. Halloween had long been synonymous with pranks in both the U.S. and Europe, usually perpetrated by teenage boys. Most of these pranks were harmless if annoying, but over time they escalated into acts of outright destruction and even violence. While children in tight-knit communities had been largely self-policing, by the 1920s and 1930s, as the social fabric frayed, children began to play tricks that were less quaint. Although the simple pranks of the past—switching shop signs, or flinging a sock filled with flour at a man’s black coat—were still practiced, so were far more destructive activities, including breaking windows, tripping pedestrians, and setting fires. By the time of the Great Depression, American youth were sawing down telephone poles, flipping cars, and opening fire hydrants to flood city streets, all at a time when cities could least afford to repair the damage.
Local governments, civic organizations like the YMCA, the Rotary Club, and the Boy Scouts, and small business associations decided to combat this wave of destruction by hosting Halloween parties in a move reminiscent of today’s school- and church-sponsored after-prom parties. In 1925, Chicago public schools instituted a “pledge respect for all citizens” that was rather pointedly invoked in response to Halloween pranks. In an earlier example of corporations co-opting the holiday, store owners sponsored holiday window decoration contests to deflect having those windows smashed on Halloween night. (This was only partly successful, as in many parts of the U.S. teens simply moved pranking to the night before Halloween, then used the following night’s trick or treating to recharge.)
While teachers and civic organizations deflected the teenage menace, younger children often attended parties thrown at the homes of their friends. To share the cost of hosting a party during the cash-strapped Depression, groups of neighbors would “pool resources and create the ‘house-to-house party’ in which groups of children were led from one house to the next, each home hosting a different themed activity.” This, of course, evolved into trick or treating. Meanwhile, for older kids, the candy “bribe” evolved from a true pay-off (take this candy and please don’t set fire to my house) to a merely perfunctory exchange.
Throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, mentions of “trick or treat” popped up occasionally in newspapers, but it wasn’t until after World War II that trick or treating truly came into its own, an example of postwar plenty, purchasing mass-produced, store-bought costumes and handing out large quantities of once-rationed candy to strangers. As early as 1950, the same adults who had invented the custom in the first place bemoaned how effective it had been, eulogizing the more “authentic” mischievous spirit of pranks past. In that year, sociologist Gregory Stone conducted a survey that found that most trick-or-treaters had no idea what the “trick” in “trick or treat” even referred to.
(It’s no wonder that the corrosively individualistic 1970s and ‘80s brought paranoia around trick or treating - another Tiny Letter for another time - only to say that a woman in our neighborhood passes out homemade cupcakes every year and I always, always make sure my kids take one, to affirm that communities are built on trust and I do not believe that my neighbors are trying to murder my children.
And yet the fundamental exchange remains, between those who give and those who get, each trying to frighten the other into playing by the rules. Even where the real meaning of "trick or treat" is long forgotten, we go through the ritual of dispelling threats through acts of communal giving and receiving. Full-size candy freely given is indeed a lovely thing, but the message of trick or treating is more important than that. Generosity is not optional. We depend on each other, in a way that’s serious and scary. Perhaps this is a different, deeper kind of generosity, one founded not on inconstant benevolence but the steady recognition of mutual need.
As we head into the dark days of winter, Halloween reaffirms our social bonds. There is danger, but there is also community. Tonight little children will walk past rowdy older kids and grisly yard decorations and the uncertain expanse of a dark front lawn and find at the end an open door, warm yellow light spilling into the night, and a whole, entire full-size candy bar just for them.
* Costco, 18 bars for $11.00
** For those who complain today that the retail Christmas season gets earlier every year, folklorist Ervin Beck explains that in the 19th century, all of these fall and winter holidays combined into “a single, more or less coherent season of events” not unlike our current ‘holiday season,” which stretches over more than a month to incorporate Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, and New Year’s Day.
You Can Find Me
I’ll be teaching a two-day seminar this December, Insider/Outsider: Writing the Participatory Adventure. From the class blurb: “More personal than journalism, more outward-looking than memoir, these hybrid essays combine personal insights with investigation, research, and adventure . . . In the first session, we'll read and discuss essays that take us from hippie communes to Amway sales meetings to witches’ covens and beyond. Students will also have the opportunity to develop and refine their own essay ideas. Then, during a two-week break, students will head out to observe, experience, and document a cultural event of their choosing. Students will return for the second session with a rough draft to workshop together.”
Basically, this means you go have an adventure and then you write about the adventure and then you have both a story AND an adventure!
***
Last Halloween I published one of my favorite pieces ever, on death and babies and God and taxidermy.
Several Halloweens before that, I published this little meditation on Halloween, video stores, and the creepiest Disney cartoon of all time.
Unless I’m Busy
Perfecting the home fog machine, making a yogurt costume for a one-month-old, baking novelty cupcakes for the Halloween school bake sale, watching The Haunting of Hill House, learning ceromancy, daydreaming about Thanksgiving showstoppers like this one
What I’m Reading
Not much. I thought I’d get a lot of reading done this month since I’d be hanging around at home with a newborn, but between Halloween activities and hosting out-of-town visitors, I’ve mostly been using five-minute breaks here and there for doing crossword puzzles on my phone.
(I started replacing spending time on Twitter with doing crosswords in the NYT crosswords app, and now a) I’m slightly less miserable and b) I’ve learned that “ashlar” refers to masonry made of large square-cut stones, typically used as a facing on walls of brick or stone.)
Also I'm Very Excited About
Return of the Obra Din, Kentucky Route Zero, this fall perfume sampler curated by Rachel Syme and Helena Fitzgerald of the fragrance newsletter The Dry Down, this Halloween plasma skull I bought at Target when I was supposed to be buying diapers, a sugar cookie recipe so good it pains me to share it.
I am also reluctantly excited about the Nose Frida, a product I refused to buy with my first three children because I thought (still think) the idea is absolutely disgusting, but we got one from a friend and Zac used it on our baby and it works so extraordinarily well, so much better than a bulb syringe, that I must endorse it, even while emphasizing again that it is very gross.
Where I’m Giving
As we get into holiday donating season, each month I wanted to include a few groups you might want to consider this year.
In honor of Margaret’s birth, I particularly wanted to highlight organizations that support mothers and babies. Pregnant women, new mothers, and newborns deserve dignity, respect, and kindness. Safe pregnancies, labors, and recoveries are a human right.
Here are a few places I know of that provide support to at-risk women and babies. If you recommend any other groups, please let me know! (In the descriptions below, I’m using each organization’s own language, hence “African-American” in one place and “Black” in another.)
Jamaa’s Birth Village, a non-profit clinic in St. Louis that provides care for women of color by midwives & providers of color, while also working to train more midwives of color.
Building Beautiful Communities is a group of community-based doulas that provide maternal support and prenatal care to African-American communities in and around Cleveland.
The Afiya Center works to funding for research that will aid in lowering the maternal mortality rates of Black women in Texas.
The Minnesota Prison Doula Project trains doulas to support incarcerated pregnant women.
The International Refugee Committee has a number of programs that provide prenatal care, labor and delivery assistance, and newborn supplies to women around the world. They also train local women as doulas and midwives in their communities.