Trunk-or-Treat Is Halloween With Training Wheels

My kids are going trick-or-treating this weekend, except it is a trunk-or-treat in a church parking lot with forty minivans, decorated hatchbacks and a two-hour window under a security light. I remember carrying a pillowcase through the neighborhood until the streetlights came on, and I feel weirdly sad watching Halloween get turned into a scheduled event. Am I being dramatic, or did we take the adventure out of it?

Terrified Of Blank Answers,
Pillowcase In Mourning

A parking lot is not a neighborhood. It can be useful. It can be kind. It can be a nice little setup for families who need the lights on, the route short and the exits visible. I am not here to kick the folding table out from under the nice lady with the plastic pumpkin and the Costco chocolate. God bless her. She showed up, which is more than half the neighborhood will do.

But yes, you are right. Trunk-or-treat is Halloween with the adventure surgically removed. It is a drive-through candy window with extra steps. It is a parking lot pretending to be a neighborhood, and everybody is smiling because admitting that feels mean.

Halloween used to have a little weather in it. A little risk. Not real danger, just the kind that makes a kid feel eight feet tall. You had a pillowcase, a flashlight with batteries weaker than a dying porch bug, and a curfew that amounted to “when the good houses run out.” You learned which porch had the motion skeleton. You learned which old man gave full-size bars and which lady gave raisins like she was mad at your blood sugar personally. You learned to cross a street, keep up with your friends and not panic when somebody’s older brother jumped out from behind a bush wearing a rubber mask that smelled like a tire fire.

Now everything has cones, wristbands and a sign-up slot. We took childhood and put it in a corral like it was a suspicious goat. I get why. Everybody is tired, everybody is busy, and every news story makes the world sound like a van with no windows. But kids do not become sturdy by being moved from safe station to safe station like luggage with sneakers.

Here is the move. Go to the trunk-or-treat. Smile. Say thank you. Let the kids admire the hatchback with the spider webs and the youth pastor handing out peanut butter cups like he is running a blackjack table. Then, afterward, take them down your own street.

Not ten miles. Not some cinematic quest. Your street. Let them knock on three doors. Five doors. Let them feel that weird pause after the doorbell, when the house creaks and the porch light hums and they wonder what is coming. Let them say the words to a real neighbor. Let them earn a little candy the old-fashioned way: by walking through the dark with a bag getting heavier and a parent pretending not to hover from the sidewalk.

Halloween does not need to be dangerous. But it does need to feel like you left the house.

– Uncle Bobby