Halloween, trick or treating, door to door canvassing for candy.
The goblins low to the ground, most eye level with the heaping bowls of sweets and treats. The high caloric ammo stocked up and ready to distribute in handfuls. To the motley crew of pan handlers.
Holding wide open loot bags or reflective buckets for the candy bars, gum, licorice, sweet and sour the home owner is dishing out this Halloween. If you holler loud enough in unison for all to hear and with plenty of enthusiasm the chant “trick or treat”. You get a tasty treat!
In your area of Maine or whatever your GPS planet coordinates are, is October 31st still a big deal?
As a kid was it a tradition not to be missed and looked forward to with excitement? Gathering your young friends, sisters, brothers and cousins to tramp a new or familiar neighborhood. Did you partake in the climbing up on lighted porches decorated in spider webs, orange pumpkins, the sounds of eerie music, high wind, howling and clanging chains?
Often, whoever answered the front door decked out and making an effort to play along. Wearing a pointed black hat or warlock cape or whatever creative garb. To show the kiddies they too were under the same zombie or witchcraft spell where candy is the currency? But no clown outfits this year please. The once friendly Ronald McDonald or Bozo clown persona is missing thanks to the clown’s with anger issues and not so slap happy easy going these days on the silver screen.
Halloween is one of my favorite holidays.
I grew up about a mile and half from town out in the country. Having mom and dad drop me off with my older brothers on the corner of Highland Avenue and Washburn Streets was a Halloween ritual. Combing forces to battle our sweet tooth addictions, the six cousins who lived in the yellow apartment house would combine and off we go. Systematically with pillow cases combing the streets. On the prowl for neighborhoods with plenty of lights on and avoiding the ones where everything in the house was pitch black and dark.
As a little kid, I was amazed at the generosity. Of total strangers to me for the most part who took the time. To decorate, to purchase the candy or better yet make the
home made sweets hot out of their kitchen oven. To show you the light is on for a reason. We’ve got candy, even better treats than the other residents on the street beat.
The home owner in my small Maine town enjoying the orange, black, purple and green holiday as much as the munchkins marauding the neighborhood.
The excitement of all age monsters, cowboys, princesses, ninjas, ghosts and other forms of the living dead with cuts and serious disfigurements adding to the hysteria on Old Hallows eve. The door to door hit and run like a town wide magazine campaign. Or the Swan’s guy with the deep dish pizzas and five gallon tubs of ice cream, other treats delivered on a weekly, not just once a year basis. The mail carrier has to make the same neighborhood run but on a daily basis.
Halloween, full moons, graveyards, the threat of dastardly deeds happening if the home owner does not deliver on something good to eat.
Kids disguised to protect their real identities. Knocking loudly to holler the “trick or treat”? dentists ten to one warn to “easy does it”
on the sugar intake. The one holiday to be extra thorough in brushing after carefully flossing as you sample the haul next day?
What is your favorite Halloween treat?
For me it is peanut clustered Paydays, peanut butter and chocolate Reese cups. Anything but Sahara dry popcorn balls and no thanks to the apples. Not for fear of razor blades in my small friendly rural Maine town.
The other treats that warm the usually chilly door to door are fresh squeezed hot cider and the rolled out hand cut fresh baked donuts.
The kind that just hopped out of the grease bath to drip dry on the kitchen rack. The home owners that offer those want you to come in to the light of the living room. To take off the mask, put down your loot. To reveal your true identity
and figure out are you so and so’s kid? Sometimes you learned they were somehow related to your mom and dad or Uncle Bob, Aunt Janice. Family reunion time happens.
During a series of open houses a few weekends back in Boston to help daughter number one find a home to buy, one neighbor we purposely struck up a conversation with made an observation.
The neighborhood in Jamaica Plains MA said you can tell a lot about a neighborhood by whether or not they participate in Halloween.
If more often than not, there are decorations, dummies in porch chairs and signs Halloween is observed here, then that shows you involvement. Fun people who take the time, make the investment to make sure kids remember October 31st. They stick around and have the lights on, the candy bowl by the front door fully charged to hand out no matter how many kids storm their place this Halloween.
Last year on Halloween there was snow on the ground.
The white stuff that usually holds off until at least Thanksgiving week that improves your changes of banging a deer showed up early. October 23rd, 2018 there was a blanket of white stuff delivered that caught most by surprise. That did their fall leaf raking and burning the following spring instead of back in the customary fall. I remember a couple Halloweens where winter snow was present but we still trick or treated.
Today, in areas of high urban crime, where folks don’t hobnob or really know who lives two doors down in neighborhoods, trick or treating is threatened. Less homes per block are taking part. Plus kids are trucked to events, to larger gatherings inside for fun and games and bobbling for candied apples. Maybe it is helicopter or lawnmower parents that same mileage and can wrap it up quicker.
Halloween is a time where motorists need to have sharp eyes and to drive slowly or not at all down dark streets.
Where sugar buzzed ghosts and goblin monsters can dart out in front of you in th mad dash to door number 2,3,4 and beyond. I am excited about Halloween and setting up shop on Sterritt Street this year. With the old times munching on pizzas and manning the front door candy bowl. While I dress up, round up the kids and
The white stuff that usually holds off until at least Thanksgiving week that improves your changes of banging a deer showed up early. October 23rd, 2018 there was a blanket of white stuff delivered that caught most by surprise. That did their fall leaf raking and burning the following spring instead of back in the customary fall. I remember a couple Halloweens where winter snow was present but we still trick or treated.
Today, in areas of high urban crime, where folks don’t hobnob or really know who lives two doors down in neighborhoods, trick or treating is threatened. Less homes per block are taking part. Plus kids are trucked to events, to larger gatherings inside for fun and games and bobbling for candied apples. Maybe it is helicopter or lawnmower parents that same mileage and can wrap it up quicker.
Halloween is a time where motorists need to have sharp eyes and to drive slowly or not at all down dark streets.
Where sugar buzzed ghosts and goblin monsters can dart out in front of you in the mad dash to door number 2,3,4 and beyond. I am excited about Halloween and setting up shop on Sterritt Street this year. With the old times munching on pizzas and manning the front door candy bowl. While I dress up, round up the kids and
other adults who share the same excitement of the trick or treating ritual. The expressions of new little trick or treaters especially is rich and rewarding. They look around and get caught up in the night’s excitement. They quickly catch on to the harvest of candy treats.
The best trick or treating candy was from home owners who had the little bags with the witch riding side saddle on the broom and the full moon in the background.
Inside there were lots of carefully assembled delicacies. One time while taking my own four kids out on Halloween, one resident had forgotten it was the big day the end of October. He took the kids down the hall to the kitchen pantry and each came out with a can of vegetables.
Heavy cans for a little kid to lug along the candy land. To continue getting inline and running across yards on the crazy train route to connect the lights that up ahead. And not what the kids expected but he did not want them going away with nothing to show for the trick or treating adventure.
He might have been into the firewater sauce a little too. Sleeping it off when the kids arrived despite the front porch light not on. But it was all good and the exchange made. Then quickly on to the next home to collect the stuff to
sort and trade with their friends. When they take off their Halloween masks and traces of left over face make up tomorrow.
The Maine homeowner or apartment tenant who invests in the candy, risks their life hoisting the bigger than life spider up onto the side of the building.
They dress up. They are primed and ready and invested in the Halloween trick or treating. Weather could impact the hand out of goodies. Less customers. The local church or downtown events could slice off some of the foot traffic door belling ringing too.
I googled “Halloween trick or treating in America still popular?” and this is a link that came up in the search.
And also this Halloween post on best cities to drag the kids to trick or treating. But is there an age limit for trick or treating? How big a kid is too old to do his best to capture a sugar high from total strangers? I love being in the background and keeping the herd of kids
out roaming the neighborhoods together. To make sure they don’t dart out in front of cars or get too far ahead of the little ones in tow. I am excited about this year’s Halloween and know it is because of the generosity of those that made my childhood October 31st eve memorable.
In small towns you pitch in and contribute and maybe Halloween that is safe in a small rural Maine town keeps the haunting spirit alive.
I know today noon there is a local Rotary Auction meeting to attend to prepare for the radio/television/Internet event held for over 50 years the week of Thanksgiving. Tonight at 6pm, the Northern Maine Soap Box Derby committee meets to further hammer out details for the 25th down hill race to be held June 20th, 2020.
Small towns in Maine.
The locals volunteer and maybe that spirit spills into the desire to decorate, to purchase lots of candy and to spend a couple hours and get over 500 trick or treaters.
Not because if you don’t, for fear of the trick part of the three word demand hollered on your lighted front porch.
Egging a house, wet toilet paper or vandalism to your Pumpkin Man or mock graveyard out front just does not happen.
The best trick or treating neighborhoods in my small Maine town are where four or more in a row property owners join forces. To make a Halloween Beetle Juice theme park of sorts.
Those attract carloads or trick or treaters that get more than candy dropped in their sack. Caskets with
live bodies and snakes, spiders and other things that go bump in the night.
The Monster Mash playing lowly in the background.
Someone screams when scared, jumped, startled two houses back or three forward from where you are. Then laughter is heard around the neighborhood in the ghastly front yard show played over and over all night long. To add to the Halloween trick or treat candy collecting harvest of sugar.
The amusement hooked to pulley with wires that dance up and down to make a young trick or treater wonder how do they do that? To think maybe this yard is haunted…nahhhhhh. On second thought, they are just pulling your leg, another gag. You see one of the adults grin who is having just as much fun as the trick or treaters traipsing across the series of joined back yard eerily lit displays.
Pass me another kit-cat bar would you Zeke? Someone gave you Smarties… a treat from over home in Canada, a relative. And I got to ask, when you eat your Smarties (the maple leaf version of M&M’s chocolate candies) do you eat the red ones last?
Where you are a jack of all trades and a major DIY kinda person.
Kids learn those kind of skills from their parents, grandparents too which is a good thing. And you hear plenty of stories while working together on projects. Had one to share from a local handyman that has a sore hip and announcing that he may not be able to get to the camp project as planned.
We got talking about black bears, tramping the woods back when he was a Maine guide. I guess it was because I knew he had previously told me the skill saw would be buzzing and work progressing when he was caught up after hunting season. He hopes to be able to do some trapping and says he is not much of a hunter for deer and bear now.
When he ran a sporting goods store on the Ludlow Road in Houlton Maine, Brown’s Trading Post he says a man came in who had hit a black bear.
Needed to use the phone. George asked is it dead, thinking we better put it out of its misery if it is. The man said no, it was dead before he hit it. Say what? Evidently, someone staying at John Fraser’s bear hunting enterprise for out of staters had got their prize black bear. But it fell off the pickup truck and that is what was road kill that was already dead. The police came, ticket written, the hunters found and charged with failure to secure their load.
So this year what is your Halloween costume?
Not everyone is after the Halloween trick or treating candy. It’s a time for parties. To dress up in a costume and play a part, to be a character. My girlfriend is a painted frame of art work. I am Bob Ross the painter from PBS show “The Joy Of Painting. Should be a fun night with lots of good food sampled early and later with trick or treating for a wide age of pumpkin pail pan handlers.
I’m Maine REALTOR Andrew Mooers, ME Broker
207.532.6573 | info@mooersrealty.com |
MOOERS REALTY 69 North ST Houlton ME 04730 USA