Since I didn't grow up being taught my faith or practicing it, only that God existed, I grew up pretty secular. I dressed up every Halloween, and was excited to do so. But my best friend and I were just discussing the changes in the Halloween fun from when we were children. I wandered the neighborhood with my friends, going to houses all over, and some were strangers. I stayed out until at least nine o'clock. It was clean fun. I dressed like Bugs Bunny, the Bionic Woman--the latter I remember well because it was such a cool costume with the sleeve of bionics painted on it. haha.
Anyway, when the poisons, nails, etc. found in Halloween candy started surfacing...I think it was in the mid or late '80s, and then the problems with animals, people's pets, especially cats, being snatched up and sacrificed by some Satan worshipers in the late '80s, early '90s, and we all had to make sure our pets were in, Halloween had changed. It eventually came to the point where you'd barely seen anybody out on Halloween, or parents would drive their kids to certain known houses and drop them off to walk up to door for treats. And then it got to the point that kids were driven to the local hospital to have their candy run through an x-ray machine. I remember seeing that on the news some time in the early 1990s. Really sad.
So, by the time I had children, I didn't have them participate in going treat-or-treating, but did allow them to dress up and hand out candy when they were toddlers and early grade school age. Then, we just didn't celebrate it at all and made it a tradition to go out to eat Halloween night when the restaurants were sparsely populated.
But in the past five to seven years, I regretted not letting my boys go out and trick-or-treat. Another sad thing is not since we lived in Fountain Colorado (left there in 2013) have we had any children in our neighborhood come door-to-door. I bought a whole bunch of candy while we lived in MA, and nobody came to our door, and nobody walked the sidewalks of our neighborhood. It is the same here in Lancaster, PA. Apparently, I was told the kids and their families congregate at one person's house or a community center for Halloween parties and the like. That saddens me because we've lost the fun of wandering our neighborhoods (at least where I've lived) and it was a sense of community doing that when everyone knew each other, and the kids would gather in the streets and yards and play every day outside. I feel my kids' generation and the one after have been cheated this.
