Trick or Treat!

Halloween is a time of ghouls and specters and candy and scary stories. With all holidays, there are traditions that seem strange if you partake out of that season. Halloween has an exceptionally strange tradition of children gallivanting around the neighborhood in a costume, knocking on a stranger's door, saying "trick or treat", then being handed candy. If your child did this in the middle of March, it might seem very strange. So, where did such an unusual tradition come form?

Trick or treating goes back a long time: back to the Middle Ages. Back then, poor people would go door to door on Hallowmas (November 1) who would receive food in exchange for prayers for the dead on the following day All Souls Day (November 2). This practice (known as souling) can be traced to the British Isles, but similar practices can be found around Europe. (A reference to this can be found in Shakepeare's play The Two Gentlemen of Verona.) The notion of a person wearing masks comes from ancient Celtic traditions of dressing up as evil spirits to pacify them. In Scotland, in the late 19th Century, a group of young men would dress up with black faces or black masks and white dress and carry lanterns. They would visit homes and in return would be given fruit, cakes, and money.

In North America, the first instance of going door to door while dressed up can be traced to 1911 where an Ontario newspaper reported children going "guising" around the neighborhood. Ruth Edna Kelley wrote a US history book in 1919 with a chapter called "Hallowe'en in America". She cited the origins for Halloween in her town as coming from the traditions from Europe that had become a custom adopted in America. Kelley's town was Lynn, Massachusetts, which had a large population of Irish, English, and Scottish immigrants.

The actual term "trick or treat" was not seen in a print form until 1927, in Alberta, Canada. Postcards of the era would show children dressed up or they might show tricksters of a ghoulish nature, but not exactly trick or treating, nor using the words. The term "trick or treat" didn't become a well-known term until the 1930's, and wasn't seen in a national publication until 1939. Typically, and mention of the term "trick or treat" came from the West and gradually moved East. World War II created a sugar shortage, which took until about 1947 to end. But the late 1940's and especially the 1950's, the term "trick or treat" spread quickly and because of increased attention from children's programming on TV and magazines, the modern idea of Trick or Treating came about.

Another interesting thing to mention is what happened when trick or treating went back across the Atlantic. Before the 1980's, the term trick or treat was not common in England and when it started to become more recognized, it was an unwelcome term. The English preferred guising because it  was "free from any threat". Trick or treating has been referred to as "making demands with menaces" and the "Japanese knotwood of festivals" (since Japanese knotwood is thought of as an invasive plant species that is highly undesired and unwelcome).

Bet you didn't know that!