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.
Nobody seems to have mentioned this yet, but Trunk or Treat for lazy and/or helicopter parents has cannibalized door to door visits.
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.
Lots of neighborhoods just don’t have that many kids left. They’ve grown. Easily 80% of my suburban neighborhood is over 65. And they’ve been here since the 90s.
When young families can’t buy homes their trick-or-treating becomes relegated to their apartment complex or (when those complexes are sketchy) to trunk or treats.
Moved into my house in 2017. Neighborhood has smaller kids. I bought candy for a number of years and had less than 20 groups in the entire ~5 year span. So I just stopped buying candy and leave my lights off now. Even reviewing doorbell footage there were only like a handful of groups walking around this year.
Trunk or treats have blown up out here. Why walk miles through the neighborhood for a couple hours when 30-60 minutes through a parking lot or two gets you the same amount. Especially at malls with hundreds of cars.
We use to trick or treat on rollerblades as kids to cover more ground. Trick or treating has really gone down hill. I remember being a teenager and handing candy out at my parent’s house. We got literal hundreds of kids. Like you basically were better off just sitting at the front door or on the porch if the weather was nice. The stream of kids was practically constant. That was decades ago and their neighborhood has aged out a bit but they still get a ridiculously higher number than I’ve ever gotten.
For my neighborhood it was the busiest I’ve ever seen it in 17 years. A lot of home made costumes, even teenagers dressing up and getting in on the action with the gaggles of little kids. A few houses even did mini haunted houses in the front yards and garages. A lot of other houses had people chilling in the driveways with a small fire going. It was in the 50s (F) so not particularly warm either… I’m in a lower to middle class area, no HOA neighborhood so people do what they want with decorating and it’s great.
This is really wholesome thanks for commenting!
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.
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.
Our street only has 2 houses that do it, so everyone drives right on by our block. Some of them go to parties instead, some of them are just lazy and disinterested.
I’ve kind of shamed people into decorating for Christmas, I made my house elegantly lit with a warm white glow and theirs were dark and depressing. But Halloween, just the 2 of us for years.
We’re in a high crime city so a lot of folks do trunk-or-treats and I get that, but, those kids are gonna be adults that have to learn to live here too. There’s something humanizing about going up to strangers doors, finding out your neighbors aren’t actually monsters or assholes, but kind people.
I rent, so you don’t get a chance to pass out candy anymore, but it was a bright spot in my childhood. I’m sad that we’ve abandoned that.
Plus, you got to peak into all your neighbors doors and see a bit of their life and it was a positive experience for all involved.
I rent, and I have the most decorated house in 2 miles.
I’m not in single family detached home.
I’m not either, but I live in a town home style place with a yard, but I’ve decorated everything from an apartment door to a house. You can still celebrate in many ways.
For years we’ve had almost no trick-or-treaters come to our house. We know there are tons in the area, but the number who actually stopped at our house kept dropping.
Last year it was warm enough on Halloween for us to leave the front door open, and we saw tons of kids walk past our house and heard one kid say, “That’s the creepy house.”
Which is ridiculous. There’s nothing creepy at all about our house.
Anyway, last year I decided I should make a sign to let the kids know they could stop at our house.
I made a post about the sign.
Anyway, the sign worked. We had double-digit trick-or-treaters this year.
Creepy houses are exactly where you should go on Halloween. Damn kids only caring about candy and not the spirit of the holiday!
Had only one kid actually say “trick or treat!” when we came to the door, the rest just looked straight a the bowl, grabbed a handful and left, of those only some said thank you while most just walked away. Never seen so many seemingly unappreciative kids like I’ve seen this year.
your house is cool af. I wish I had a house like that. I live in a bland box. sometimes I think about moving just to be in something that has some fucking character, I find this house so awkwardly laid out
No sidewalks. And nearby gated communities with sidewalks. Those communities are richer and setup tables outside. Two houses were handing out jello shots to the adults, one had a DJ and light show. My neighborhood still has some houses that do hand outs, but without a sidewalk most people drive up to each house, get out, knock, get back in, drive down to the next house, stop, get out, etc. Parents are worried their walkers will get run over. We can’t compete with the other neighborhoods So, in my opinion, communities built to only serve cars and not pedestrians is the problem.
This comment made me realize we don’t have sidewalks, either.
I haven’t seen a sidewalk outside of the nearest city in… years.
There’s one area in my town a few blocks away that gets SLAMMED with trick or treaters. It’s got the highest density of nice houses. We’ll see about a dozen families as they make their way over to that neighborhood.
Over the years, people in my neighborhood haven’t bothered to pass out candy since nobody goes through here, which makes even less people go through here, and so on.
We usually have several groups of families in our neighborhood. Our streets were packed this year, though. First Halloween in a while that wasn’t cold or raining or both.
Our neighborhood only has two entrance streets with a lot of connecting interior streets and cul de sacs which makes it a wee safer due to no through streets and less traffic.
Many families set up firepits in their driveways to hand out candy, sometimes with music playing or movies projected on garage doors, one house has a popcorn machine every year. This year several houses had buckets of mini shots for parents and a lot of others smelled like some dank vape. When we drank we used to bring a wagon with wine and cups to share with neighbors. It’s a really great time.
This year there was even an Inflatable Cupcake Castle of Doom.
Last year there was a haunted house set up so that at the end you were watching the next group on cameras and you controlled the puppets and stuff, very Jigsaw style. That house has always had an elaborate haunted house but couldn’t do it this year.
So…yeah, trick or treating is still alive in our neighborhood.
Neighborhoods go through cycles. If all your neighbors have no school aged kids, you will see low turnout.
