@Hadenoughofallthis I’m 34, as a child in the UK I only ever went Trick or Treating once with one friend and not a single person opened their door. None of my friends ever went trick or treating either. I can’t recall anyone ever coming to our door in all those years.
Back then, no one expected sweets. You would say “Trick or Treat” and dependent on the response of the person who opened the door you would either do a party piece or something spooky/jokey. So the one year my friend and I went, our plan was to sing a song for Treat and take a toy skeleton out of our pockets and jangle it about whilst doing a scary sound effect for Trick (we were only 7!). If you did a good party piece you might get some spare change. My Scottish relatives used to go “guising” as children and taught us this was how things were done.
The first time I was ever given sweets at Halloween was in the early 90s when I happened to be in the US on the 31st October. In every shop I went in people were trying to give me sweets and I was politely refusing and explaining that I wasn’t allowed to accept sweets from strangers. One shopkeeper actually got tears in his eyes and said “Oh no sweetheart, this is HALLOWEEN and all the little children are supposed to wear costumes and we give them candy. It’s a great tradition. Mom? Dad? Please can the little girl have some candy?” People were actually openly criticising my parents because I wasn’t in a costume and acting as if it was abusive or something! The whole night I was being spoken about as the “sad little girl with no costume” and hearing people ask what was wrong with my parents. Total strangers were trying to shove Trick or Treat bags and sweets at me and my family and I couldn’t for the life of us understand what the heck was going on 😂.
To be completely honest, I felt really uncomfortable. I wasn’t used to being spoken to by strange adults and all the usual rules of not speaking to strangers and not accepting sweets or gifts seemed to go out of the window.
Halloween definitely became more of a thing as I became a teenager and the actual “Trick or Treat” part became just a saying and not an “Act” so to speak.
As children regularly started coming round Trick or Treating in the 00s, my older relatives still asked them to do their “Treat” and tried to give money. It was met with confused looks and “don’t you have any sweets?”.
Whilst it’s definitely an ancient tradition throughout the UK, it certainly has become more American in its delivery. I’ve spent much of my life on both sides of the Atlantic and Halloween here now is completely unrecognisable from my childhood in the UK and much more like what I saw in the US as a child.
Halloween seems bigger than ever this year too.