Trick or treat

[dr_whom]

From an article about a particular family and their decision not to celebrate Halloween:

"we don’t like the idea of 'trick or treat' – give me candy or I’ll trick you"

There are various things potentially worth talking about in this article, but that line kind of took me by surprise. Is that what the actual modern practice of trick-or-treating entails? In my upbringing, "trick or treat" was basically a content-free formula with no more meaning than 'I am participating in the ritual of Halloween!'. (Cf. "Simon says", which doesn't mean 'I'm conveying orders from Simon [whoever that is]', but rather just has a particular function in the rules of a game.) I guess I may have had a very vague awareness that "trick or treat" might have originated from some kind of "give me candy or I'll trick you" quasi-threat, but I never had any awareness that the synchronic practice of trick-or-treating involved any steps other than (1) wear costume, (2) knock on door, (3) say "trick or treat", (4) get candy; there's no alternative step to take if someone doesn't give you candy other than going to the next house. Is that not the case?

Comments

[thekinginyellow.livejournal.com]

1) You're right about the nature of the trick-or-treating ritual, but there are all sorts of clear indications that Halloween is still a "devilish" holiday filled with "tricks." They happen not to be linked to the candy ceremony anymore, but they're clearly there, what with the house-egging and all.

2) Even when a synchronic practice is totally unobjectionable, sometimes people still object to its abstract symbolic content. See, e.g., that discussion we had a while ago about white dresses and other wedding customs.

[dr_whom]

1) This too is something I was not aware of growing up.

2) Oh sure; I'm not (for the purposes of this comment thread) discussing whether Bernstein is right to so object. It just took me by surprise that that the "abstract symbolic content" in that sense of "trick or treat" even came to mind for her—as I say, it's something I'm at best only barely cognizant of.

[dr_whom]

...I think I just inadvertently quoted The Mikado with "is right to so object".

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

Well, I think *not* handing out candy does potentially open you up to getting TP'ed/egged. If they're so concerned, they really shouldn't risk it.

Also, these people are dumbasses.

[dr_whom]

I think *not* handing out candy does potentially open you up to getting TP'ed/egged.

See, again, this is something I'd never heard of in my upbringing. Well, I guess I must have heard of it from, like, books? But not as something people actually did.

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

I just mean that if I were going to maliciously target anyone, it'd be the people not handing out. So how does not handing out protect you?

I have seen houses TPed after Halloween. No idea if they happen to have not been handing out candy. But I can imagine that in a tighter-knit community, some amount of cheerful pressure might be applied against the non-conformists. But Halloween's such a mellow holiday, it's hard to imagine people really being like, "Those guys didn't hand out candy! Let's get 'em! AAAArrrr!"

All of which I think is a misunderstanding of the original custom, which I think provided people protection against *supernatural* threats by being generous and giving to children.

[dr_whom]

I think I'm a little confused by what you're referring to. How does "how does not handing out protect you?" connect to the topic of the article, or my comments about it?

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

Huh? It is the topic.
These folks somehow think that by not handing out candy, they have insulated themselves against the threat in "trick or treat". But you can't protect yourself from a threat of tricking for non-participating by not participating.

Like, if you don't wear green on St. Paddy's day, you'll get pinched. You're not going to avoid getting pinched by not wearing green and saying I refuse to wear green because I don't want to get pinched. No, you'll get pinched. Likewise, if there is any real threat involved in the trick or treat formula, refusing to hand out candy just means you're gonna get tricked. Don't want to get tricked? Hand out candy.

I've witnessed plenty of Halloween trickery or mischief, and could certainly imagine it directed at folks who don't hand out candy, though I suspect the victims are generally chosen at random or for other pre-Halloween reasons. It might be reasonable to argue that these tricks occur on Halloween because the night is associated with tricking, and so if we all abandoned the holiday, there'd be no more excuse for tricking. But this is not the same as saying that you don't want to be involved in the candy-related threats of small children who obviously aren't going to cause you any harm and therefore be a total killjoy.

[dr_whom]

She doesn't discuss handing out candy at all (let alone even say that her family doesn't do it). She says that she does not allow her son to wear a costume and go trick-or-treating. And "insulating themselves against the threat in 'trick or treat'" doesn't have anything to do with the reasons her family doesn't participate in Halloween.

[http://users.livejournal.com/little_e_/]

They're not participating because they're dumb. Don't over think it.

Saying she doesn't want to participate in Halloween because of the threats involved doesn't mean there aren't going to be threats involved. It just means her kids are going to hate her when they grow up.

[midnight-sidhe.livejournal.com]

You clearly grew up in a much more civilised land than I did. My neighbourhood was wild on Hallowe'en, because that was where everyone, and I really do mean everyone, went trick-or-treating. At some point they started barricading off the street and having the parents take turns watching it to keep the cars out because it got dangerous. You learned after your first year of living there that if you wanted your Jack o'Lanterns to survive, you didn't put them out on the porch; you put them in the window or in the front hallway where they could be seen if the door opened. When you opened your door on the morning of 1 November, there'd be dead pumpkin corpses and guts all over the street, along with miles of silly string and often bits of eggs. Someone or other would get always toilet-papered. We never did, but we sort of lived in blind terror of it. You bought buckets of candy, which we always ran out of because (as I said) everyone came to our street for trick-or-treating, and when you ran out you turned out all the lights visible from the street so that people would just think you weren't home, rather than stingily refusing to hand out candy. Seriously: I can remember eating quietly in the dark in the dining room because we hadn't eaten before running out of candy once, and every year there'd come a time when we'd basically evacuate the front rooms and hide in the bedrooms. This was probably excessive? If there was a direct correlation between not giving out candy and getting tped, one that wasn't just rumour, I never heard about it... but there definitely were rumours, and my parents were genuinely worried.

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

[dr_whom]

The pumpkin in that one is a nice touch, I think.

[q10.livejournal.com]

i think for a while i didn't even parse ‘trick or treat’ into those words. i mean, i got the ‘treat’ part, but i just analyzed it as being combined with the unanalyzable ‘trikur-’, which i treated as a kind of ‘cran-’ morph.

perhaps relatedly, whenever anybody tries to convince me that Halloween is in any sense a synchronically Christian holiday (e.g., as part of arguing that Jews shouldn't observe it), in that it's All Saints' Eve, i have a hard time taking that seriously as anything other than etymological trivia, in part because of my own experience that my knowledge of what Halloween was predated my knowledge of what the word ‘hallow’ even meant by several years (is ‘hallow’ as a noun a thing in contemporary English outside of Halloween and Harry Potter?) with an intermediate period spent consistently mishearing the long form as ‘All Hollows' Eve’, which didn't make a ton of sense, but you could sort of retcon a story and it's not like anything about contemporary Halloween observance has anything to do with hallows either.

when i realized that All Saints Day is still a real thing that people take seriously in some real cultures, it came as something of a shock. i'd previously thought it must be either a thing that was either totally deprecated or else was the Catholic equivalent of one of those fourth-tier Jewish holidays i can never keep track of, because it was so totally overshadowed by the obviously 100% secular observance of Halloween.

also, obligatory Onion video link.

[miraclaire.livejournal.com]

People do occasionally talk about "hallowed ground." But yeah, I'm totally with you on the whole Halloween is secular thing :)

[pastwatcher]

"was the Catholic equivalent of one of those fourth-tier Jewish holidays i can never keep track of"

yeah I think that's pretty much how my family sees it.