Trunk-or-treating and changing Halloween traditions.

We are coming up on that time of year when people have differing views and advocate for their ideas. So I'm going to publicly announce my opinion:

I'm opposed to trunk-or-treating.

Trunk-or-treating is very popular here in Mormondom. I don't know whether it's popular in other places, since I don't live there. However, I do remember on my mission in Washington and Idaho that the branches and wards held trunk-or-treats. Frankly, I think they're a dumb idea. But they seem to be popular, and my mom disappointed a lot of people last year when, as primary president, she elected not to hold one.

Now I understand if you live in a rural area where it's impractical to go from house to house. Then it's a great idea. Or if you have disabled children or other unusual circumstances. But in general, I don't like them.

They promote greediness. With regular trick-or-treating, you have to work to get your candy, and you get exercise going around the neighborhood. With trunk-or-treat, it's just, "Give me candy!" every few feet. And my mom tells me that many unsupervised children will go in loops around the parking lot, getting more and more candy just by walking from car to car.

Some people say they're safer, because kids aren't wandering the streets where cars are driving. Well, that may be true, but they are still assembling in parking lots where people are coming and going. And if you follow the sage advice to only go to houses you know, there shouldn't be a problem with creepy people (and creepy people are rare anyway).

When trunk-or-treats are Mormon-sponsored events, they can unintentionally promote cliquishness. Now, I know some wards do use it as an opportunity to bring other members of the community together, and it works to a point, but I still think it can be a little cliquish.

But what bothers me most is that it destroys a Halloween tradition! Whatever happened to the good old days of ordinary trick-or-treating?

Now, I suppose that this isn't the strongest argument, because traditions change, and trick-or-treating as we know it is a twentieth-century innovation. I was startled to find that "trick or treat" doesn't show up in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1947! I know they had other names for it (such as "Halloween visits"), but I didn't know it was so new. At the Church History Library, I've been looking at the old editions of the Children's Friend (the predecessor of the Friend) from the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and indeed some of the issues from the 40s and 50s downplay trick-or-treating in Halloween celebrations. (The Children's Friend was much more secular than the Friend, and the October issues feature lots of nonreligious Halloween stories and poems about witches, skeletons, and ghosts. And I found not one but two stories about black kittens aspiring to be scary Halloween cats and ride witches' brooms, and they would practice arching their back!)

I think trick-or-treating was a good innovation because it replaced pranking. I don't know of much pranking today, but maybe that's because I live in a good neighborhood. But I think in the first half of the twentieth century, it was a major problem--and not just relatively innocuous things like soaping windows, but serious things like setting up cables at gates so that people would trip and land on their face. The Children's Friend seems to think doing good deeds is the best thing on Halloween, but trick-or-treating is better than pranks. (They're right of course.)

My annual Halloween viewing includes episodes of silly 1960s sitcoms (The Beverly Hillbillies, The Addams Family, Bewitched), and by that time trick-or-treating was a well-established tradition, even though the term had only been in the lexicon for twenty years! Trick-or-treating in the 60s was pretty close to the way it is today, except that there were more home-made goodies and apples, and there were some phraseology differences (like "playing trick-or-treat" and "tricks and treats").

My experiences with the Children's Friend and 1960s shows has given me insights into the ways Halloween traditions and perceptions have changed over the years.

• Vampires, werewolves, and zombies are a major part of Halloween today, but they weren't much fifty and sixty years ago, even though monster movies (and songs!) were huge. They were much bigger on ghosts, witches, and skeletons. The one exception I can think of is a Halloween Bewitched episode where Endora turned Darrin into a werewolf. 
• Instead, they used to be much bigger on goblins and brownies (the elfish kind, not the dessert kind). I was surprised how often brownies showed up in the Children's Friend, since we almost never hear about them today. And the only goblins I can really visualize are the Gringotts goblins.
• Recently there have been Pinterest-type suggestions that instead of cutting a lid for your jack-o-lantern, you carve out the bottom. I was wondering why, if this was the superior way, we hadn't already been doing that. Well, apparently jack-o-lanterns really used to be lanterns, meaning that people would carry them with them. That sounds really dangerous to me.
• We tend to think of ghosts and jack-o-lanterns as separate things, but they used to combine them sometimes: there were spooks that consisted of a pumpkin head with a ghost body. I've heard them referred to as both ghosts and jack-o-lanterns.
• You've probably played the game where you eat a donut off a string, but they used to do that with apples. They would bob for apples from tubs of water and from strings.
• I've sometimes wondered if pumpkin pie and spices were really a Thanksgiving thing that spilled over to Halloween, but no, they've long been part of Halloween. 

What was I talking about? Oh yes. Trunk-or-treats. Don't do them.

On a Halloween-related note, I won a race yesterday! It was North Salt Lake's Halloween 3k, and I won. Never mind that it was mostly children and parents with strollers. But it was free. All I won was a flashing ghost necklace and a pumpkin, because I didn't want any of the candy they were giving out. Also, my Vector costume ("not pajamas!") was more conducive to running than other costumes would have been.

***

Time for Pumpkinundation Roundup! This week I kind of got overwhelmed and tried to tone it down a bit. I didn't tone it down as much as I probably should have, but I did a little bit.

 I got a Kneaders pumpkin spice steamer, which is basically warm milk with pumpkin spice flavoring. There are pumpkin spice marshmallows that taste strongly of ginger, and this is like the liquid version of those--meaning it tastes like marshmallow and ginger. I didn't taste the pumpkin.

 I got a cinnamon caramel apple. It was pretty good. I thought it was expensive at $4, but some grocery stores sell inferior caramel apples at higher prices, so it's not too bad.

 My mom brought these Lofthouse candy corn cookies from a school activity. I haven't had many candy corn-flavored things this season. They're like the regular sugar cookies, but with a bit of a buttery note--even though candy corn doesn't taste like butter. They weren't too different from the regular ones.

 I had some leftover cooked pumpkin from last week, so I threw the rest of it in a pumpkin pizza dough I found online. Since it wasn't pumpkin puree, it didn't mix too well.

 It was a little too doughy, and you couldn't really taste the pumpkin.

 This Caramel Apple Caramel Cob is an interesting item, since popcorn balls are a traditional Halloween thing, and then caramel apple is a Halloween flavor. It was weird, because there was a fake apple flavor mixed in with the caramel. You'd think all the popcorn would make it somewhat healthy, but it's not--it has more than 200 calories and about 37 grams of sugar.

 Then I got these Nestle Toll House Pumpkin Spice Chips, which are disappointing if you expect something good, but good if you expect something disappointing.

 I put them in Kodiak Cakes batter, along with the last of the cooked pumpkin. Since the chips are mostly palm oil, they got a little weird when cooked, but not necessarily in a bad way.

 My niece asked why it had yellow and orange stuff in it. The orange was the chips; the yellow was the pumpkin. You could actually taste the pumpkin, unlike the pizza crust.