Halloween: No Tricks, Only Treats

I watched the little kiddies come to my door on Halloween night—in such terribly cute costumes, some of them almost too small to hold up their plastic pumpkins for me to drop candy into—and I do think to myself that the holiday has become a bit pallid.
When I was a kid, Halloween was a night for serious pranks. It was a night for wreaking vengeance on unpleasant or mean neighbors. In my suburban neighborhood, I can’t imagine someone taking a paper bag full of excrement—dog or human—putting it on someone’s porch, lighting it on fire and ringing the doorbell; then standing far back to watch the householder try to stomp out the blaze.
Or, if you really didn’t like the guy, not soaping his windows and screens, but rubbing wax into them. One chap near my house, knowing he had it coming, waited outside with a rifle. The unhappy perpetrators spent the rest of the night cleaning up.
Or the time some friends of mine piled old tires in the midst of a fairly major thoroughfare, poured gasoline over them, lit them—and backed up traffic for blocks.
Halloween was a night to put everything moveable inside, in the garage or down the basement. A faucet left thoughtlessly on the side of the house might invite a driveway full of water or even ice on a cold night.
You didn’t damage cars or structures, but that didn’t keep people from parking wagons and anything that could be hauled up onto a roof way up high. One chap I knew was engaged in some serious mischief when the householder came out and threatened serious injury.
My acquaintance fled. He was pursued. He leapt onto the newly floored basement of a house under construction. As he ran across the floor of the house-to-be, he spotted the hole left for the basement stairs and jumped over it.
His pursuer was not so fortunate. My acquaintance confessed that as he listened to the man howl from down in the cellar he really wanted to go back and help. “But,” he said, “I figured if I did the guy would take a two by four to me. So I just ran on.”
There was nothing in the paper about anyone dead or seriously injured so we both concluded the chap had found a way back out and gone home to lick his wounds, in otherwise decent shape. That was a REAL Halloween adventure.
My dad told me that out in rural Iowa the big thing was to go out and tip over outhouses when he was a boy. On one occasion, as they tipped the toilet over on its door, there came a terrible yell from the fellow now trapped inside. Again, no doubt wisely, they just ran on.
Those were real Halloween adventures. The bright purple plastic balloon in the shape of a huge spider that a neighbor of mine forces air into on his front lawn every night for three or four weeks in October wouldn’t have lasted a few seconds fifty years ago.
Nor would the ballooned witches and hobgoblins and pumpkins. I can hardly imaging hanging strings of orange lights from the shrubbery. What might they have been used to decorate fifty years ago?
Halloween is no doubt safer. You needn’t peer out for fear of what might happen to anything left outside. There are costumed mommies and daddies guarding every clutch of toddler and tykes. It’s really much more genteel.
But it’s also just a shadow of what All Hallows Eve has been for centuries. It probably paints me as an atavistic primitive—Frost’s “Great Stone Savage Armed” for me to admit that there is something about the old Halloween that I miss. When “Trick or Treat” meant just that.