Tricker Treat

Was I the only kid who grew up thinking that the phrase we shouted at the kind folks who opened their doors to us costumed vagabonds on Halloween night was “Tricker treat”? I don’t think I realized it was the ultimatum “Trick OR treat” until I was past the tricker-treating age. I always assumed that a tricker treat was a particular kind of treat that had to do with Halloween, which (like sugar plums or figgy pudding) was probably not as good as it sounded and hence had been replaced by Snickers and Dum Dums and Sugar Babies.

Halloween, I must say, was never my favorite holiday—nothing could compare with Christmas when I was a kid. Or now, for that matter. But like any kid who was allowed to, I had great fun dressing up and going door to door in our neighborhood gathering candy in a plastic pumpkin-shaped basket. The basket was small, so when it filled up I would dump it in a plastic bag my father obligingly carried around as he escorted us from house to house. I remember dressing as Zorro several times (who cares if he was a guy? He had a cool horse and he got to play with swords!), a butterfly, an Indian (I believe that’s what the package called it—Halloween is not a PC holiday), a clown, and only once a princess (my best friend was going to be one—I bowed to peer pressure).

We lived in Utah for several formative tricker-treating years, and I remember bundling up like an Eskimo underneath my costumes; it still strikes me as odd to see kids in Virginia running around in costumes that bare their arms and legs at the very end of October. I feel they’re missing part of the experience somehow. If you’ve never tricker-treated in the snow, you’ve never worked hard enough for your candy.

Which, by the way, is always slightly less fun to eat than it is to collect. I hated (and still hate) hard candies, and hard candies that come with a cardboard stick inside them that you have to chew around still strike me as particularly unappealing. And if you got anything with mint or peanut butter in it, everything else in the bag started to taste like mint or peanut butter very quickly. I often still had candy from Halloween left over in July (only the least tasty things, of course), at which point I think my parents were justified in quietly disposing of it.

I was always thrilled to get candy you could play with—candy cigarettes were a favorite of mine even though the flavor wasn’t very exciting. They don’t sell those anymore (or rather, they do, but they call them “candy sticks” as if we don’t figure it out from the imitation cigarette-carton packaging): apparently it’s bad to let children use their imagination if it entails pretending to do something we don’t want them to do in real life. Perhaps it’s a legitimate concern, but never once as a kid did I (or for that matter any of my friends) lose sight of the divide between play and reality. Just because I pretended to smoke my candy cigarettes did not in any way mean that I thought it was a good idea to smoke real ones. For one thing, you can’t eat real cigarettes when you’re done with them and that takes all the fun out of it. I pretended I was a runaway quite a lot, but never once did I actually run away. I pretended I was a pony too. It didn’t mean I thought I was one. That’s why it’s called pretend.

But soap boxes aside, I’m beginning to think Halloween is even more fun when you’re not a kid. This occurred to me the first year I dressed up to hand out treats instead of tricker-treating myself. It was such a laugh to see all the kids parading around as superheroes (Power Rangers were big that year) and Sesame Street characters and inanimate objects—much more fun than just getting to dress up as one thing yourself. It was fascinating to see which kids would push to the front demanding their treats (Power Rangers) and which ones hung at the back waiting for the crowd to disperse (princesses who didn’t want their tiaras knocked off)—and which ones refused to come up to the door at all (toddlers clinging to their parents). Well, I WAS dressed as a clown, which I suppose counts as frightening to some people. And besides, we spend so much time telling our kids not to talk to strangers—especially ones offering candy—that the whole idea of Halloween must seem rather baffling to the smart ones.

They say that there’s nothing better than being a kid at Christmas unless it’s being a parent at Christmas. Not having kids myself, I can’t weigh in on that, but having wandered through Charlottesville’s traditional Trick-or-Treating on the Lawn of UVA, I can say that I appreciate the spectacle (and the costumes) much more from behind a camera than I ever did from behind Zorro’s mask.